


For What Binds Us

by Cybertronic Purgatory (orphan_account)



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/F, Romance, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-29
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-02 16:49:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Cybertronic%20Purgatory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-ME3, Samara/f!Shepard. In the aftermath of the Reaper invasion, both struggle to come to terms with the present. Haunted by the war and trying to mend, Shepard wonders if it is "another time, another life" yet. Samara deems it so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The ending of Mass Effect 3 can be debated for its merits (or lack thereof) elsewhere, but for this piece of writing to even make a lick of sense, I have taken creative liberties with or outright ignored what the ending told us at times. Shepard just isn't that trusting of holographic AI children who claim to decide the fate of the entire galaxy. Just be aware of this decision as you read this story.

_Goddess guide my path towards eternity_...

The pain shot through her skeleton, sharp twinges following the crushing sensation she had been feeling for what seemed like a lifetime. Samara knew she was not dead – not yet – but the intensity of the darkness and the weight of it bearing down upon her was squeezing out was little lingered on. Reciting the prayers was all that was left for her to lean upon.

 _Goddess embrace my mistakes and faults_...

She would die having done what she swore to do, and it was all she could have asked for in a life as long and torturous as hers. Her dues were paid.

The last thing she saw was a red light engulfing the city, and the Reaper above falling onto the ground. She ran only after making sure that all the group of soldiers she fought alongside with in the assault made it through ahead of her.

 _Goddess grant me peace and_...

Voices were disrupting her prayers; muffled and far away, coming from across a great distance. They were unfamiliar, tinged with an accent unlike what she had expected from the abyss between life and the beyond. All the expectations she held... But perhaps there truly was only darkness awaiting her. That and the heavy burden of weight to crush her through the nothingness.

"–from here, I heard it."

"She couldn't have survived... Wait. I hear it too."

 _Let my death be painless_...

The darkness broke first, a sliver of light hitting the side of her face. She blinked, and as she did there was a shrill squeak.

"She's alive! Quick, help me with this!" A hand stretched inside, naked fingers brushing against her temple. "Samara, are you alright? Can you speak? Are you injured?"

Before she managed to respond, the weight eased up on her chest. In shock, she drew a deep coughing breath. The dusty air stung her throat, and her chest convulsed, the ribcage straining. Arms encircled her shoulders and dragged her out, carrying her through concrete and metal rubble. One asari commando's face kept floating in and out of her sight, a face equally frightened and revering, a sight that reminded Samara of the homeliness of asari space. It was the same sight which greeted her as a justicar wherever she went there, and she could not help but feel a tinge of comfort as the commando forced water into her mouth.

With the water having wetted her parched throat she was able to talk again, and she turned to address the commando. "How did the battle go?"

"Well," the commando replied and disappeared out of sight as Samara was loaded into the back of a vehicle.

Next to her lay a turian, blue blood gushing forth from his face as a medic desperately tried to stop the flow. He was fighting against the human medic, pushing at their hands, snarling at each touch and muttering incoherence. She reached her hand out and put it over his, and he stilled his wild thrashing to turn to her.

"Palaven," the turian wheezed, clutching at the barrel of his rifle. The plates on his face were partly torn off, and his voice was barely more than a wet gurgle. "Is Palaven safe?"

"I do not know," she answered honestly, though she wished she could have told him more. He was dying, and she had no comfort to offer him. It made her feel insufficient.

"I wish... I hoped I could have seen it free again. To have died on its soil... How will the spirits guide me home from here..." The medic tried hushing him up and for once he obeyed, turning away from Samara.

She kept breathing, feeling the pain disappear with each lungful of air. It only took a few minutes for the transport to fill up with wounded and dying, each of them sighing and crying. When someone asked if the transport was ready to go, Samara pulled herself up and limped out. The asari commando attempted to stop her, but Samara assured her she would be fine. The commando looked skeptical, but handed her a few rations and medi-gels, waving as the convoy rolled off through the rubble.

Samara clutched at her side, peeling the armor off as she applied the gel directly onto the sore points of her torso. She sat down on a slab of concrete as she waited for it to be absorbed and truly looked around at the destroyed ruins of London. It was little more than a pile of grey and black ash, billowing smoke rising from several locations. Now and then a shuttle passed above, but she would signal for them to move on: in comparison to the wounded she had seen, she was fine enough to make her own way out.

The city spread out for miles, but in the grey dusk of constant twilight the heavy clouds enforced upon the area, she could make out lights to guide her way. Dusting herself off, she began the long trek to remaining civilization.

She lost any grasp of time without the difference in light between day and night. Her omni-tool was damaged beyond repair, and according to one shuttle which stopped to offer her a ride, all radio communications were down. They were still counting losses, but as far as they could tell, all the Reapers were dead.

She did not dare ask about Commander Shepard. Her curiosity was tempered by the fact that the answer may not be the one the hero deserved.

Instead she chose to focus on the present, picking her way through the rubble as she followed the stream of survivors to the north. In the mess of Reaper corpses and rotting husks, she found so many dead and dying. Most of them asked her to kill them out of mercy. She learnt their names and memorized them all, repeating them as a mantra to herself. Their sacrifices deserved to be remembered.

Thirty-two necks were wrung before the buildings began to thin out and charred fields became the new scenery. The convoys were now carrying more dead bodies than living persons, and she accepted a ride with a truck only after they told her that they had found no survivors but her. They rode for miles, past crashed ships and make-shift tent camps, dropping off supplies and picking up lists of names to run with other camps. She followed along, aiding with what she could as they weaved their way to what was commonly known as Last Hope.

As far as she could see, the lands were just ruins and burning earth, the heat scorching each time she put her feet down on the ground. It was hard to see how anything could be rebuilt from such utter devastation, and she heard the same sentiment echoed in the soldiers traveling with her. She merely listened, sitting with folded legs and keeping watch for any hint of movement, a sign of survivors in need of aid.

They found none, though one Alliance marine kept coming up with reasons as to why as he chain-smoked cigarettes and talked ceaselessly to Samara. She found herself unable to respond with anything but short platitudes, though it did not seem to matter to him. He just needed to voice his thoughts, and she was willing to listen.

Last Hope – or as the flickering holographic sign said, New Hope – had been a bastion during the Reaper invasion he explained as they rolled in. "It was here we all rallied, preparing for London in the underground bunkers, the ground shaking as Reapers passed above us." When they arrived the settlement sprawled out in all directions, tents and pre-fabricated housing units stacked on top of each other.

The whole city of survivors was a maze of races, each of them trying to establish contact with the fleets still in orbit even as the comm network went down every other minute. Shuttles came and went every hour, representatives of the various races trying to gather names and status to present on to whatever scattered government they had left. Samara met with each of them, passing on what she knew, trying to give purpose to the thirty-two names she carried ingrained on her mind.

In between, she waited, thoughts lingering on someone else's fate.

It was foolish, and she admonished herself for it, but there was an ache of uncertainty longing for resolution. Though she was offered to be taken aboard the asari fleet and flown to Thessia, she declined. At first she could defend staying with the names, a shield and anchor all at once, a reason to remain and seek purpose. The names disappeared, one after another, fates returned to grieving partners and government lists until she had none left to pursue: it was then she began to go through the camps, attempting to offer what little help she could.

Most of all, she tried to find a slip of empty space into which to pour out all of her impressions. The battle had left marks that ran deep, and questions left unanswered. No one knew what had happened beyond the wave of energy sent out from the Citadel and Crucible. As the force of it flung Samara off the building's rooftop and sent her falling to what she thought was her death, she knew Shepard had succeeded. In the short fall, she was content to enter into the great beyond. The red light filled the skies, imprinting her retinas with bright spots that still floated up even though countless days – maybe even weeks – had passed.

Time took on an elusive quality, slipping out of her grasp. She tried not to listen to or ask questions of the refugees, knowing that a slip of their tongue would result in a call of her Code to correct them. At one point she even dropped what she was carrying and walked out of a building, and from that point on she withdrew into the asari enclave where they at least knew the danger of a misspoken word near her.

Slowly, the words spoken with Shepard's name changed tone: she became a martyr, a hero dead for the cause. An altar appeared outside the hospital, candles gathering around a N7 helmet. Samara did not know what to think when she saw it – on one hand, death was a calming ending for great warriors, granting them stillness of the soul which life could never bless them with. On the other hand... She did not believe it until she saw the dead body herself.

In a small room, surrounded by the din and chaos of aftermath, Samara closed the door and sat down on the hard floor, but instead of the meditation she thought to strive for, she instead sagged forward.

She was exhausted, wandering the fragments of a planet for which Shepard fought for, haunted by a fractured memory from a different time. She had been unable to forget Shepard's touch, the soft stroke of a hand along hers and the unspoken promise Shepard wished to give. Nor could she forget how she rejected it.

It had been acceptable, a lost dream destined to die with her mortal vessel – it imbued her with a peaceful abandon towards death.

Only death never came to collect when it was meant to, leaving room for another hundred years of sorrow and regret.

Allowing herself a moment, she rested her face in the palm of her hands, the fingertips tracing the bone structure underneath. Her breathing slowed down as she pressed the thumbs against her eyelids, but her cheeks were still moist when she straightened her back and rose to resume the motions of the day.

Samara fell into the cycle of hours passing – of sleeping when the sky became marginally darker, of eating when offered and of taking what small measure of comfort she could find in the silence of a shared meal. While many left, new ones poured in, and the camp's population remained constant, even among the aliens. Some claimed they stayed out of a sense of duty, or a wish to see a new beginning through. Many stayed because they felt that it would be the same elsewhere.

The cycle of days churned on, Samara threading the beaten path circling her around the camp. Following it from the asari enclave, she passed by the few remaining salarians and past the turian encampment, through the thousands of human soldiers and civilians and then turning at the drell's prayer house up to the shuttle hill. On quiet days, a window of an hour opened up during which no landings or take-offs happened there, and if the mists let up she could see for miles. From there, she observed as the fires died down and the smoke parted, the only thing seemingly marking the passage of time.

The clouds thickened above New Hope, and thunder sounded in the distance, a noise causing a great many fresh traumas to open up in the residents. Children wailed whenever a crack split the sky in two; soldiers clutched at their weapons, nervous fingers ready to pull at triggers.

Then the rains came, a slow cold drizzle which lasted for days, turning the dirt paths into mud rivers. It chilled Samara to the bone, the humidity soaking through everything.

Her exhalations during the meditations became small clouds, hanging in front of her mouth as she defied the temperature and weather to re-shape her resolve into the steel it needed to be. She willed herself to relinquish piece by piece of the dreams that haunted her, and she slept less: each time she closed her eyes and lay down to rest, there was only one apparition there. Only one ghost that, without fail, caused her to wake up gasping for the same breath she had been denied when she was being crushed underneath the rubble.

After one particularly bad night, she awoke to a thick silence. Going outside, she saw New Hope covered in a thin sheet of soft snow, the flakes floating down ceaselessly. The serenity was only interrupted by a shuttle, flying in low at an urgent speed and making a dash for the hospital's landing pad. It was the first rescue shuttle for days, but as soon as it passed the stillness was resumed.

Then came the whispers. It began as a slow hum, but after a few hours it had spread all over. No one was sure, and the hospital was trying to protect the privacy of the patient, but there had been glimpses of a name, of a body pried out of black armor. It could have been hope blinding a pair of eyes. Samara tried not to pin anything on it, but then the certainty grew. They recognized the voice screaming for sedatives, and high-ranking Alliance officers had been seen arriving at the hospital.

The snowfall continued, and Samara found herself unable to stop the small smile of relief when the shout went out across New Hope. "They found her! Shepard's alive!"

She closed her eyes that night and slept deeply, dreaming of nothing at all.

 


	2. Chapter 2

It started with rain. Cold and harsh, pelting her face with tiny shards of ice and a sting slicing into her skin. She blinked up at the sky and saw nothing but the color red, and she closed them again, opening her mouth to feel water on her dry tongue. The chill increased and the shivers in her spine hurt – but each breath, each blink of the eyes hurt.

_Once more._

The worst thing about having died once already was that she knew there was nothing waiting, no great beyond or warm light. All she was, left behind in a corpse to rot away.

After her first death, she couldn't cope with that, couldn't forgive herself for having lived a life thinking there would be a tomorrow for herself. She fought for the tomorrow of others, rifle in hand and duty in heart, but little else on the personal plane.

She tried, though.

She tried.

In the end, she thought she would have been okay with that – that she tried and that would be enough. It wasn't.

Moving her hand was nearly impossible, but she persisted, turning her head and opening her eyes. In the blurry vision she could barely make out the digits, dark from the gloves or crusted blood, ash or burn wounds. They glistened in the low light, and she continued to try. At one point she closed her eyes and when they opened, everything was far colder, but the light had increased.

It was a haphazard effort, driven on by blind need and struggling against an ache that nearly consumed her, but when the index finger moved, her throat let out a strangled noise of contentment. Then the others began budging, one by one, and she could push that motion into the wrist before the hand became limp again.

 _Just once more_.

Three years that defined her life and ended it, not once, but possibly twice. And she'd only been alive through one third of it.

The dog tags were hanging outside of her armor, resting on the swell of her broken chest plate. The distance between where her hand lay and those elusive tags felt further than she could push herself, but she wasn't one to give up. It wasn't in her blood, not once had it been a mind-set she allowed.

She wasn't content with the choices she'd made, but she needed to be selfish if these were her final moments. No point in going over the big decisions when the smaller ones hurt more. If there was one thing death allowed, it was the ability to be small-minded. To look at one thing and one thing alone. To think of one person whose sole memory made her heart ache.

She knew it was technically against regulations, but she was terrible at playing according to the book. Not a good trait, or even a loveable one. Just a bad habit made worse by continuously breaking the rules and cutting a few corners. A minor offense in the grander scheme of things, and she'd be damned if anyone reprimanded her for modifying the dog tags. It was for her own piece of mind, she insisted, even when clutching them in her hand during the sleepless nights, her own memento from that which never was.

A figment of a dream, a fractured love.

_In another time, another life._

Her fingers were at her ribs, dragging themselves upwards, one agonizing inch at a time. At least one of the bones were broken, she could tell from the way they were pointing in different angles, but in the torrent of pain it was difficult to pinpoint a single fault in the myriad of them.

The thumb nudged against the tag, and it was enough. She let out a groan and let her body drop dead back into the rubble, hearing the recording play again. " _For Samara, on the day I die._ "

A silly recording, made in the wish to say a final farewell. Even though Samara accepted no possessions, Shepard wished that if death were to engulf her, she would at least let the truth be known to one single person whose existence... Whose presence...

Shepard felt her thoughts growing dim, and she sighed, letting her head fall back. The effort to keep it propped up was too much.

She tried. It wasn't enough.

It didn't grant her happiness, just the dream of another time and another place in where they would meet without the burdens and duties keeping them chained to a life they did not choose, but that chose them.

" _Samara, I know that you said..._ " The recording of Shepard's own voice was briefly over-voiced by a prominent whirr, a hum that seemed familiar yet one she was unable to place. She wanted to swat at it, the drone of buzzing flies interrupting her last moment, but it was impossible to move a single limb. Her body was numb, and she was unable to even pry open her eyelids. " _I understand. It doesn't feel fair, or right, that we deny ourselves what little happiness we could have attained, but it's the choices we make and sacrifices we live with_."

A light shone into her eyes as they were forced open by something so warm that she screamed. Pressure and prodding and voices floated at the edge of her perception, and she felt like when she woke up for the first time at project Lazarus. Only there were no faces in her field of vision, just a mad rushing heartbeat that kept getting louder and louder, beating like thunder.

" _It's the regrets we carry to our graves. It's the love lost..._ "

A warm current seeped through her veins and she slowed down her breathing. Something guided her hand to the dog tags again, and she clutched at them, choking off the sound of the farewell she knew was coming. She knew the message by heart, knew it from all the times she deleted and re-recorded, wanting it to be absolutely perfect. A single piece of utter perfection in the sea of flaws she left behind.

 _You'll survive, Shepard_. "You'll pull through." A familiar voice, and someone else moving to turn off the recording.

" _It's the knowledge of what could have been..._ " Shepard gathered her last strength and pushed the interfering hand away to hear the end. " _In my dreams, there's an ocean. By the ocean, there's us. Simple and imperfect, like us. And never to be._ "

She opened her eyes, snowflakes catching on her eyelashes. "Beautiful day," she remarked, and heard a laugh before she drifted off into the warm abyss of sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

The news had changed the state of New Hope: the city of refugees and survivors slouching through the days without aim or will began to slowly disintegrate. Fleets were departing, a few ships at a time, and tents were dismantled as people began to want more than a muddy sinkhole. Scouts returned from the initial surveys, reporting back of untouched colonies with intact infrastructure and unspoiled crops.

The galaxy was not as it used to be, but people signed up and departed, keen on escaping a nightmare that left them screaming and weeping whenever they heard the roar of thunder and lightning.

Samara herself was prepared to leave, having finally accepted a bunk on a frigate bound for asari space. Her waiting was at an end, and it was time to return to where she belonged.

Just as she was heading to the shuttles, her path was intercepted by an Alliance officer with a request for her to come along to the hospital. While she was used to armed escorts surrounding her on foreign planets, she noticed the other patients and doctors flinching as they passed through the corridors in tense silence.

The narrow hallway outside of Shepard's room was guarded by four marines, all eying Samara warily as they confirmed her security clearance and one scanned her body for any hidden weapons. She had not intended to visit, placated by the knowledge that the Commander was alive. It was all she could have asked for, and hoped that the aftermath of the war waged would allow for the hero to rest out. People rarely got what they deserved, but it was a welcome change.

"You're clear to go in," the marine said when his omni-tool beeped the all-clear.

The soldier by the door grunted. "What about her biotics?"

"I assure you, my intention is not to harm," Samara said calmly, turning to meet the officer's eyes. He pulled at his white facial hair thoughtfully before nodding. She returned the gesture before entering.

Flowers lined the walls of the small room, the mingled scents creating a heady perfume, scent and vivid colors she had not seen in so long with notes attached wishing for a swift recovery or giving inadequate thanks. On a table stood the slender white orchids Shepard loved, the ones she bought fresh wherever she could find and left in the observation room after Samara voiced her admiration of them.

Even after Samara rejected her, the orchids were delivered, but she did not touch them, merely letting them wither and dry to dust.

She recognized a few others native to Thessia, the very same she had kept in her rooftop garden in Serrice four hundred years previous. Each morning at the crack of dawn, just as the rush hour traffic began to fill the sky, she went up there and tended to them. After a while she would be joined by her bondmate who brought up breakfast, and together they watched their city stirring awake once again.

Memories of that life were terrible indulgences, and she turned away from the bouquet. The immense presence of flowers nearly eliminated any free space except for the bed hidden behind thin swaths of cloth, and an armchair in the corner in which Liara T'Soni lay curled up, arms crossed over her chest.

Stepping carefully over the spread-out datapads on the floor, Samara tapped the young doctor on her shoulder. Liara awoke with a violent start before recognizing the justicar. "It's good to see you, Samara," Liara said in a hushed voice.

"Likewise," Samara replied, "but I was called here for a reason none have divulged."

A low moan came from behind the curtain, and Liara immediately rushed out of the armchair and pulled them apart. On the bed lay a wreckage of a body, wrapped in gauze and peppered with bruises. The face was swollen and the black hair matted, shaved off on one side of the skull. Plastic lines and tubes of varying sizes connected her body to monitors and drops, the dark blue veins bulging out from her naked forearms.

"What is it, Shepard?" Liara asked, eyeing the equipment quickly before bringing a glass of water to Shepard's pursed mouth.

She drank a few sips before choking on the liquid, and Liara anxiously watched the change in heart rate.

"I heard her voice." Shepard sighed, the tip of a pink tongue darting out to wet her lips. "Samara."

"She's here."

"Liar."

Samara, who had been frozen still up until that point, saw the reluctance in the Commander's face and moved closer. "Open your eyes. See for yourself."

The eyelids fluttered open and the dark eyes, sharp and clear, focused on Samara immediately. She could never forget the intensity in Shepard's gaze, in those emotive eyes that fixed Samara in just a fraction of a second. The whites were blood-shot and after a while the clarity abated, and Shepard blinked as the pupils began darting around, the heavy lids drooping down.

"Hey Samara," Shepard slurred, lopsided smile gracing her torn-up face. "The afterlife was horrible, but I knew you'd come."

"Forgive her," Liara said, making a note on the datapad hung on the side of the bed. "She's been drifting in and out of consciousness, and the strong sedatives have a pronounced effect. I don't think she is even fully aware of where she is."

"I know perfectly well where I am," Shepard sighed, slumping back in the bed. "In a good place."

"You have not answered my question, T'Soni," Samara said calmly.

"She has been calling your name. When she is awake, when she is asleep, she calls it." Liara, satisfied that everything was alright with Shepard, heaved out a sigh. "I found out that you were here, but she has not been even remotely lucid until today, and I fear it's not enough. What good will it do her?"

"May I speak to her privately?"

Liara nodded, clearly relieved to be able to have a moment on her own. "I was just about to get some coffee."

When Liara left and shut the door, Shepard's eyes snapped open again, wild and terrified as if snatched from a pleasant dream. Finding Samara, she relaxed once again, stretching out her right hand towards the justicar. While Samara did not take it, she noted that three fingers were gone, cut off at the knuckles, leaving only the thumb and index finger.

"Tell me about death, Samara," Shepard pleaded drowsily, hand still in the air, trembling and shaking from the effort.

"This is not it."

"Then what is it?" Shepard sat up and grabbed on to Samara's arm, squeezing tightly around the elbow with the fingers she had left. "Is it another life yet, Samara?"

"It is another time," she admitted. There was no other word for it, but things were different, changed by the very person holding on to her.

When they first met on Illium, Samara recognized her name. Commander Shepard, the butcher of Torfan, the name at the center of transpired events that had fallen outside the range of Samara's pursuit of justice. There were many rumors surrounding the legend, scraps of an actual being hidden away and over-shadowed by the actions. History remembers only that wrought by the hand, not the complicated convergence of the personality dealing the blow. It was how Samara knew her: as a decisive force cutting a swath through the galaxy, leaving irrevocable changes in her wake. Intriguing, in a way no person should be to a justicar. She swore the oath, but even after she left the Normandy she kept it, renewing it.

Shepard had a way of bleeding the black and white purity of the Code into a grey mess in which Samara would have drowned without the oath to protect them both. It stayed Samara's hand, but worked as a double-edged sword. She repeated the five thousand sutras as she meditated in the observation room, but even then she could not avoid the person herself. Shepard burned with an intensity, drawing closer, and even when they merely sat silent for hours on end and watched the vast void, there was something else growing and unfurling between them. Thicker than understanding, finer than camaraderie, and so much else.

She was swept up in a mission she prepared to die for, but found resolution and freedom along the way, and came out on the other side... Alive. She owed Shepard her life, and could not give anything but a warrior's broken strength in return.

"I saved the galaxy," Shepard muttered, leaning her forehead against Samara's arm, the skin burning hot even through the justicar's clothes. "And I feared death because I thought you wouldn't be there. Because I  _knew_  you wouldn't. Death is nothing, and life... Life is all that matters." Then Shepard looked up and smiled, that mischievous little expression so rarely seen. Samara felt herself returning the smile.

"You are remarkable."

"No, I just have a lot of dumb luck."

Letting Shepard lean on her was not entirely selfless: she enjoyed the sensation of her touch, no matter how fleeting. Even before the Commander uttered the thought of the two of them together, she had considered it – just now and then, but it was a recurring thought. First appearing when they were waiting through an afternoon before going to Danitus Towers, she and Shepard walked the streets of Illium, and Samara noticed the way Shepard would stop for a small wrinkle in the flawless surface of the planet, pointing it out when prompted.  _Just trying to connect my past to the present_ , she claimed. It returned on the Citadel when they were watching the dreadnoughts pass above Zakera, and it kept coming back.

Small glimpses of a life she could never live. Small thoughts she treasured but tucked away, hoping to quell the desires she thought were one-sided. A stray touch of hands, a smile and a look conveying far more than it should.

"I meant it, you know," Shepard said, grunting in pain as she reclined back on the bed. "All the things I said."

"Are you aware of where you are? Of what has happened?"

"No," she admitted with a drawn-out sigh. "The pain and the drugs make it hard. Sometimes it's a dream, mostly a nightmare. My lungs keep drawing air and I keep hurting. I keep thinking I'm about to die, but then they reel me back in."

"The flame refusing to be extinguished." A poetic re-writing of a scene warranting no such favorable wording.

They fell quiet, Shepard hooking her index finger around Samara's, simply holding on as her eyes struggled to remain open. Her breaths were coming in short gasps, and the frequent low beeps were the only noises in the room.

"Did you take my advice?" Samara asked. Three months ago, it was Samara who held Shepard's intact hands, asking her to chose a different person to hang on to as the Citadel bustled around them. Even then, when she thought herself past the affection and the faintly hopeful dreams, she felt her throat constrict around the words.

Shepard's hand twitched. The answer to her question was obvious. Twice she had asked, and twice Shepard must have ignored her, nursing an impossible love.

Samara could still draw up the perfect image of the Normandy's engine core, the small oscillations of energy and light altering as they dropped out of FTL speed. For five hours she looked at it and it alone, the only things her tired eyes could stand to watch as she desperately tried to put the scent of Shepard's neck out of her mind. The curve of her lips and the feel of a firm, calloused hand on her waist with the little static discharge of biotic energy... The feeling of Shepard's cheek as she pulled herself away...

Forgetfulness was not one of the virtues bestowed upon her by the Goddess.

"We could have found happiness together." Her voice was strangely bereft of everything, coming out so neutral and far away from the sleepy drawl she had been speaking in prior.

"Yes." Samara bent her head forward, disentangling her finger. When she did, Shepard closed her eyes and rested her cheek on the pillow. "And more, but..."

Shepard raised her voice above what Samara tried to say, uttering a sentence that froze Samara still in shock. "I release you from your oath, Samara."

A crash was heard from the entrance and immediately an arm began pulling at Samara's, dragging her out. The last she saw of Shepard was the mutilated hand hanging from the bed, stretched out in her direction.

In the corridor, Liara was flaring with biotic energy, the marines looking between the two asari in great confusion. "You have to leave," Liara insisted, "now."

"She released me," Samara said to herself in disbelief, gazing at the closed door. She must have known the consequences of it: in the last moments she possessed an awareness, however brief, she had known what it was she did.

"You can't do this, justicar."

The bonds of the third oath of subsumation broken, Samara knew that as a justicar she was forced to act in accordance with the Code in regards to the choices Shepard had done and the actions undertaken. The Commander had a just heart, but even then some acts were unforgivable in the strict eyes of the Code.

T'Soni knew the importance of what had occurred as well, ordering the marines to ready their guns. "Leave," she demanded. "I will kill you if you even try."

"You would throw yourself against certain death," Samara remarked, still only looking at the door. The machines were beginning to beep, and above them Shepard was moaning, uttering noises with no discernible meaning.

"Think of her, then. There's been enough misery to last a hundred lifetimes, do not add to it. Please," Liara pleaded, voice tinged with despair. "Turn away, leave, and never come back."

Disobedience never came easy to Samara, even when she was unbound. Yet she left without hesitation, making a choice that had her torn and wondering about her faltering dedication. As Earth's grey and blue profile vanished behind her, she held the gun in hand, weighing her options.


	4. Chapter 4

Shepard rubbed at her nose, flinching when the metal skeleton of the prosthetic tore open her tender skin. She was not used to the numb metal digits attached to her hand, but in front of the mirror she struggled to accept that the image reflected was her at all. The face was still bruised, but Liara assured her that it used to be worse when it was swollen up beyond recognition. It looked bad either way.

 

Shepard stood in the bathroom, swaying on her weak legs, poking at the discolored patches of skin, hissing now and then when she managed to elicit a shred of pain as she studied her constantly changing body. One cheekbone was smashed in and had yet to be reconstructed, her nose was broken and bent in two places, altering her profile completely. Her chest caved in on the operating table once, and if she spread the flimsy shirt apart all she could see was scar tissue.

 

She ran a hand over the short buzz of hair on her right scalp, shaved off to fix the cranial implants. It was hard to reconcile the current Shepard with the old one.

 

What she hated the most about being in a hospital was the way the drugs took the edge off not only the pain, but everything. She would grasp at reality and then have the certainty pulled out from under her with another dosage as they rolled her into surgery to correct a sudden drop in vitals or replace another piece of faulty cybernetics.

 

Her implants were unstable, successively being rejected. The skin weaves were splitting open from all the times she'd been cut up and taken apart, revealing a faint glow beneath. A side-effect, the doctors said, but they couldn't say why or from what. Neither could she.

 

Feeling done with inspecting the decay of her own flesh, she held on to the wall and fumbled back to the bed where she slumped over, dizzy and ears ringing. The room spun for a few minutes as she regained her perspective, pressing her palms against the sides of her head.

 

“You've been up again,” Liara remarked as she entered with a tray, putting it down on the bedside table before helping Shepard up. “Is it getting any better?”

 

“What is this?” Shepard asked, ignoring the question to which she could not give a honest answer either of them would be satisfied with.

 

“Your first solid meal in months.” She settled down in the armchair and immediately began scouring through updates from her agents and feeds.

 

Shepard looked at the tray, poking her fork around in the vegetables and prodding the fine cut of meat. She had no appetite and found the thought of eating repulsive: for once, her mind managed to maintain a semblance of cohesive thought for longer than forty minutes, and she wanted to put the time to good use. Not spend it with food dripping out of her mouth because suddenly her muscles were going lax.

 

“Put the datapad away,” Shepard pleaded. “Fill me in. What's happening in the galactic community? No one will tell me anything.”

 

“You have not been receptive to news,” Liara said without looking up.

 

“The doc ordered you to say that.”

 

She smiled slightly. “They don't want to get you agitated. Stress could have adverse effects on the recovery process. Eat, please. It will be good for you.” When Shepard showed no sign of obeying, Liara put down the datapad. “How about a bargain? For each bite eaten, a piece of news. Sounds fair?”

 

Shepard grasped the fork and quickly ate a mouthful of vat-grown mashed greens. “Go on. I'm all ears.”

 

“Where to begin...”

 

“What's the state of political affairs?”

 

“A good place to start,” Liara agreed. “Not much is different from before the assault: martial law is still in effect among most races. The salarians and hanar governments are the strongest ones left, practically intact if one is to compare with the rest of the species, but they have their own issues to deal with.”

 

An image fluttered by in her head and she gasped quietly, a question following instinctively. “Are the mass relays working?”

 

Liara arched an eyebrow in surprise. “I thought you did not know anything of what was going on.”

 

Shepard struggled to pinpoint exactly why she was asking, but it was an insistent fear implanted into her mind. Any attempt to part the sluggish mist wrapped around it was met with... An empty void in which she fumbled, anxious and forgetful. “I don't, it's just... Something that happened when I activated the Catalyst. Are they still working?”

 

Liara eyed Shepard closely, searching her face for something Shepard tried to hide until the asari gave up. “While the energy of the Crucible overloaded the Charon relay, it is working again. For about three weeks, no fleet could get in or out of the system. It was... Tense.” Liara activated a holographic display on her omni-tool, showing the relay's status. “The rest of the relay network is working, albeit with the odd outage. If several ships pass through one in too short a timeframe, they power down and take a while to get working again. Half of the quarian flotilla is still in orbit over Earth due to this.”

 

Dutifully, Shepard cut into the meat and ate a few slices, chewing slowly until it was a mass of fibers that she struggled to swallow. There was a trace of metallic aftertaste.

 

“How does it taste?”

 

“Not much,” Shepard said, sipping on the water as she tried thinking back. She remembered the fantastic space battle taking place as she slumped over on the floor – b _ut why was she falling down on the floor, clutching a pistol and bloodied flesh_? The jagged flash of pain cut at her awareness and she recoiled back into the hospital room. On the water's surface in the glass a small drop of blood was dissipating: she gave the glass a swivel to make sure it went unnoticed.

 

Resuming the task of plying information from the Shadow Broker, she smiled when she caught a break, but the strain of the lips moving made her skin break along her jaw. Again. She brushed the remaining hair to cover it before speaking up. 

 

“So what's that about pirates?” Seeing Liara's confusion, she offered an explanation. “There's a reflection in the lamp. I can see the writing on that datapad.”

 

Liara hesitated, tapping her finger against the tabletop.

 

“What's with the doubt, T'Soni?”

 

“Knowing you, any hint of trouble and you will want to go rushing off to resolve the situation.”

 

“I promise I'll be good.” Not that she could actually go anywhere, seeing as a mere trip to the bathroom left her short of breath and close to tears. To further the point, she pointed at her naked leg, large red scars from the multiple fractures criss-crossing the dark skin.

 

Liara gave in. “Fine. A number of mercenary bands withdrew into the Terminus and Traverse during the war, loading their ships with food and supplies. They thought they could outlast the invasion that way... And now they're returning, trickling in and taking advantage of undefended colonies.”

 

“Not tempted.”

 

“I have a hard time believing that.”

 

Shepard shrugged, biting down as she felt her shoulder nearly shift out of position. The fragile state of her body was killing her more than anything else – every other day something went wrong and she ended up on the operation table for emergency corrections. “Have you told Garrus? I bet he'd be on his way in a heartbeat.” 

 

It was partially a trick to fish for news of the crew, because Liara had been surprisingly tight-lipped about them. She had heard a few voices now and then outside, but they all got turned away for arbitrary reasons. All she wanted to know was how the rest of them had fared.

 

Liara lowered her head. “He is still among the missing.”

 

Death was never something she thought might happen to one on her crew. She fought tooth and nail to keep them all alive, her odd band of mismatched personalities that argued and drank and shot things together, and who all had the same hard-necked refusal to die as she. Each loss was hard on her: she hated the memory wall Anderson put on the Normandy, but it was his constant reminder to her that she had to learn to cope with it.

 

Then he died, too. And what of the Normandy, what of everyone else?

 

The swell of emotions in Shepard was uncontrollable, and she pushed the tray away with such a force that it fell on the floor. “How?” she demanded to know, having trouble tempering the rage and formulating the questions in a way that would yield answers. “You two were by each other's side, I saw you, I told you to run back...”

 

“We got split apart.”

 

“How could you lose him?” Her accusation cut Liara deep, who slammed her hand down on the table.

 

“I did everything to find Garrus!” she snapped. “I crawled through the no man's land for days, shouting myself hoarse, organizing search parties to find the both of you.” 

 

“Do you think that was enough?” Even as Shepard said it, she heard how out of line it was.

 

“It's been months! If there's anyone still in London, they are nothing but a dead corpse!” She quickly closed her mouth when there was a rap on the door, jumping over the growing puddle of ruined food to see who it was.

 

“I heard shouting.” Miranda's distinct voice was recognizable to Shepard anywhere, and she held her breath to better hear the whispered conversation outside the half-shut door. “Is everything okay?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You're upset.”

 

“It's nothing.”

 

Miranda touched Liara's cheek, letting the hand stay there as she stepped closer. “Will I see you tonight?” Shepard could see Liara's quick nod. “Good. I've got something special planned.” Their voices dropped even lower so that Shepard couldn't hear the rest of the brief conversation.

 

She regretted what she'd said, having always been bad at dealing with the frustration of not knowing what was going on with her crew. Hell, she didn't know anything beyond the hospital and what little information Liara would let trickle through. It was her fault for asking, but being left in the dark was driving her up the wall.

 

Not to mention that every time she tried to think back of what happened on the Citadel, she found only fragments she was unable to put back together and see the whole. She felt out of touch with everything, and it was making her fray.

 

She felt a sharp jab in her side, but ignored it as the door opened and she went for the opportunity to apologize. “I'm sorry. Nothing makes sense. I thought that I, I don't know, would feel better now that all of this was over.” Pushing everything ahead of herself for months, thinking it'd just be easier to deal with in that distant future now upon her. “Forgive me for getting so angry, but I just want to be the one out there, making a difference.”

 

Liara's hard expression softened. “The difference was made aboard the Citadel, by you. We're picking up what survived and piecing it together. Let us do the work for once.”

 

“There must be something.”

 

“Well...” Liara dragged it out, thinking it over. “Hackett has been waiting for you to explain what exactly happened on the Citadel. I admit, I am curious as well.”

 

Shepard shook her head. “I can't.” Her throat constricted even as she spoke, fist clenching in the mattress as the pain in her side worsened. The Citadel floated back into view, _a hallway filled with bodies stacked high and a scent so terrible, and the voices of two men arguing_. There were flashes of light and shrouds of darkness, more like a dream than reality. Just thinking about it was causing a headache to thrum up. 

 

The absolute uselessness was getting to her.

 

“Maybe another day,” Liara said.

 

“One more question. How is Samara?” She'd dreamt extensively about Samara, but there was a crispness to her in Shepard's mind, a presence that could not be questioned.

 

“Well, and with her daughter.”

 

“I'm happy for her... But it would be nice to see her again.”

 

“She won't come.”

 

Shepard remembered suddenly, bending over as the pain in her side worsened. “I know.” 

 

She moved her hand from her side and heard Liara gasp. “Could you call for a doctor?” she asked.

 

Liara dashed out and she was alone with her thoughts, though they were quickly unravelling.

 

Why she released Samara from her oath was difficult to pinpoint, but it mattered then. Part of it was pure curiosity, to see if the justicar thought she had been unjust; perhaps to see if she still thought the Code was worth adhering to. She pushed Samara, and she received the answer. Then, on another hand, it was just a wish to free Samara from any last bonds tying them together, however selfishly she wished to hold on.

 

Shepard just wanted the best for Samara, but she never knew what it was. Samara was a difficult person to read, cool and distant, and Shepard just wanted... She just wanted her. So simple, so unattainable.

 

_Never to be._ Old instinct made her grab for the dog tags, but they weren't around her throat. She was about to reach for the bedside table when she collapsed on the bed, wheezing pathetically as her prosthetic fingers scraped against the closed drawer.  _The love lost_ .


	5. Chapter 5

The mountain ranges of Lesuss were bathed in morning mist, a deep greyish blue that slowly gave way to a lighter transparent state as the heavy cover of clouds broke and let down intermittent bursts of faint sunlight. Samara watched the sky through the grand atrium windows of the monastery, as she did every morning: it gave her a sense of calm.

 

Falere had been hard at work after the Reaper forces turned their attention away from the planet a the upper levels were returned to an almost normal state, with the exception for the persistent smell of burning electrics that refused to disappear. It was only when one came down to the atrium that the events began to be hinted at, with deep cracks running across the windows and blue blood spattered along the edges.

 

Outside on the terrace, Falere was tending to the communications array, humming an unfamiliar song that carried indoors. She was trying to return normal connections to the outside world, over-riding the old blocks put in place by Gallea so that Samara could get her call through. High command had been forced to relay their wish to talk with her via a nervous commando, who refused to even meet Falere's eyes and departed as suddenly as she'd come. Until then, Samara had been blissfully uncaring about the galaxy outside, enjoying the escapism from the galactic stage.

 

The holographic display of the communicator trembled, a distorted voice coming through.

 

“Is it working, mother?” Falere called from the door, lingering on the last word, still cautious and guarded around Samara. Four hundred years were not undone in the turn of a hand, but it still surprised her to see how much her daughter was willing to strive towards a better balance between them.

 

“Almost!”

 

The image flickered again before stabilizing. “Justicar Samara,” matriarch Lidanya said, deep and fresh scars gracing her face. “There's an important matter to discuss.” Straight to the point, as was typical with Lidanya, a military commander to the bone even as a maiden when they first crossed paths... With Samara on the wrong side of the law. _Follies of youth._

 

“I am listening.”

 

“It would be better if you'd come here in person, considering the delicate nature of this,” she grumbled, fully aware that Samara would not budge on that point. “Nonetheless. We sustained heavy casualties with the fall of Thessia and assault on Earth. Having accounted for a majority of those involved, we can now certainly declare you to be the last of the justicars.”

 

“That was expected,” Samara said calmly. She had not crossed paths with another justicar for years, but she still knew all the handful of names by heart. “We were few, and this war has been brutal.”

 

“The other matriarchs...” The connection lagged for a moment before picking up again. “... Think it's outdated. That with the beginning and re-building, we are in need to re-define and allow for... Hello? Can you hear me?”

 

“Falere, it's breaking up,” Samara said over her shoulder. “Lidanya, you were saying?”

 

“The future of the Order now rests in your hands. The matriarchs will summon you to Thessia soon, and they want an answer.” The connection broke into static, leaving a buzzing noise before the hologram sputtered and went out.

 

“I'm sorry,” Falere said as she came in. “I still need to improve upon the more practical bits of my knowledge. Did you have enough time?”

 

“More than enough. Are there any arrivals due tomorrow?” She quickly changed to a more pressing subject.

 

“A few.” Falere turned and pointed at the abandoned western monasteries clinging to the mountain wall. “I think they will be suited to stay there, in the Vaelin complex.”

 

“Very good. I will return tonight.”

 

Lesuss had once upon a time housed hundreds of thousands of Ardat-Yakshi, the colony existing as a solution to deal with the wide-spread problem. Back then it was regarded as a prison world, a place to put those suffering from the genetic defect. Guarded by justicars, it was a place of extremes, the settlements growing and expanding as the Ardat-Yakshi became more prominent. Once the asari took up a role in the galactic government however, the planet's population dwindled until there was just enough of them to fill a single monastery.

 

Even then, it was a secret only whispered of behind closed doors on Thessia. In the aftermath of the Reaper war, however, the secrecy fell and crumbled under sheer need. As displaced asari sought for a home, Lesuss, due to its relatively untouched state, became a prime transition colony. Falere had taken it upon herself to organize what she could, but limited to the monastery she could do little for the actual arrivals.

 

Samara instead became the active force, investigating each building to see if they were suitable. She wandered the ruins of abandoned temples and prisons, all of them empty and dusty. While a solitary pursuit – and in the more decrepit places, bordering on dangerous – she found it enjoyable.

 

It gave her gasps of solitude, of silent contemplation.

 

In the airy halls of the Vaelin house, she let the light illuminate the intricate tapestries, crafted by Ardat-Yakshis two thousand years ago. They were faded and worn, but even so Samara identified the symbols of the justicars, the tempered black curves and lines familiar from her art history degree at Serrice university. Of course, even in her youth the call of battle tempted her away from more scholarly pursuits, and she barely achieved that slip of paper, now lost in the turns of fate.

 

The meaning was not forgotten though. The dark blocks, exquisitely detailed with flourishes all representing a subtle nuance, were meant as quiet threats towards the force that would push them down. Lesuss' history was a bloody one, closely tied with the rise and falls of the Ardat-Yakshi population. What was once a colony where riots and rebellions happened every century was now just a stretch of mountains and vast oceans with howling winds and overcast skies.

 

Another remnant of the once bountiful asari republic, broken down and scattered across the galaxy. History weighed on Samara's mind, now that the Order was close to joining it. She was the only link keeping it alive, but even she would pass from the living in due time.

 

The secret and true history of the Order closely mirrored hers: a mother whose Ardat-Yakshi daughter went on a murderous rampage sought to put an end to the misery she had brought forth, and in the pursuit of justice the Code slowly coalesced into the five thousand rules that were to shape the Order. Over time, the justicars grew beyond just keeping Ardat-Yakshi in line, but each new recruit eventually found their way back to the foundations. They were bound together by destiny, both playing equal parts guardian and prisoner, prey and predator as they spiraled into the future.

 

Samara saw only images of Thessia's fall, occupied as she was with evacuating Illium, but when the camera panned over the burning Justicar Hall she knew that fifty thousand years of knowledge was lost in the broken ruins. She never had the time to pursue the libraries, and with the scriptures burned, there would be little left to impart on any new justicar apprentices.

 

The justicars were at an end, and what a troubled one to let it end with. One who was so unforgiving, measuring herself up against a rigorous set of rules she had not only let fall apart once, but twice in the recent months.

 

She left the upper halls and traversed deeper. While the lower levels of Vaelin was overrun with native flora forcing its way through the floor tiles, there was nothing else amiss. Assured that it was suitable for refugee families, Samara returned to Falere, arriving just as the stars became visible.

 

Her daughter was sitting in the sparse garden lot, sifting the soil through her fingers. “It is dead,” she proclaimed sadly as Samara approached. “Those... Creatures... They poisoned it. Nothing will grow here.”

 

“What did you grow?” Samara inquired after a moment, still unused to actually asking for answers, so used to preferring not to hear them.

 

Falere looked ashamed as she brushed off her hands. “The datyni blossoms you grew on Thessia.”

 

Samara felt a sharp sting in her chest. She remembered those flowers, how she labored to get the sensitive growth to survive each shift in temperature. They were troublesome, but for their heady deep scent, she did anything. “How did you manage to get them to take root?”

 

“Years and years of waiting for the right seeds that would survive the rain periods and winters. I bargained with Gallea, trading and taking on extra duties just for a slightly different packet in the hopes that they would be the ones. Rila said I was too nostalgic, but it felt important to me. A small comfort in a harsh life.” Falere sniffed. “Rila liked them so much though. She sat here and smelled them in the afternoons.”

 

“You miss her.”

 

“Don't you? Wait, nevermind. A justicar can't long for her past life.”

 

Despite their long talks, four hundred years could not be undone in the course of a few words. Samara did not resent her daughter for the complex feelings. “I am sorry, Falere.”

 

Falere squinted up at the horizon. “Forgiveness is not easy, mother. It takes time and patience, and sometimes I find it lacking within me despite how... I love you, as did Rila.”

 

Samara sat down beside Falere, half an arm's distance between them. “I thought of you two, more than I should have. Even when all of our lives were packed up and given away, even when the bond was dissolved and hunting Morinth became all I pursued, I could not let go.”

 

Falere was quiet for a while, picking at the hem of her sleeve. “You are a poor justicar at times.”

 

“I am,” Samara admitted. “But the Code demanded more dead daughters than I could give it.”

 

“I have one question. Was it worth it?”

 

“It was the only thing I could do.” Swearing the Code had taken much from Samara, but in the disaster of knowing that Morinth was hers, a result of her latent genetic disposition it was the only path that made sense. The Code replaced her own flawed and weak morals, substituting frail will with iron resolve. “Nothing else seemed adequate at the time.”

 

“We used to have justicars come by, bringing in new sisters. They were brutal and arrogant. At times, it was easier to think that you were like them, since it was less hard to hate a mother who was nothing like you remembered her.”

 

“I have changed.”

 

“A little, but not much. There's still warmth in you, still a bit of love. The Code can't erase everything, mother. Not even that which it demands.”

 

 _Demands of the Code_. Samara mused on them as the days passed and more cautious refugees came to Lesuss. Her mere presence was enough to make them feel safe, and while she was often offered a cooked meal in gratitude, she turned them down to spend more time in the isolated monastery with Falere.

 

The demands were endless and crushing, chaining her to a path upon which she was doomed to meet her end once she came across a superior foe. Yet there were allowances and loopholes, large swaths of life left untouched and open for interpretation. She could keep no family or ties, but love... The Code did not explicitly prohibit love, acknowledging the need for intimacy even for the most devoted souls sworn into service. Four hundred years, and no one stirred Samara as she sailed through the galaxy, steeped in solitude. All that time without veering from her course.

 

Until Shepard.

 

Entrusting the sensitive matter of her pursuit to Shepard was not simple: carrying a burden alone was easy, but allowing another to see, to render judgement... Asking openly for aid was not what she was used to. Even before placing the justicar's collar around her neck she would struggle on alone, stubborn and determined – _her task, her fault, her decision to be made_. Yet the closer she drew to Morinth, the faster her daughter went through victims, learning and adapting. By the time she was just one mere step behind, Morinth equalled her in strength. As loathe as she was to admit it, she _needed_ help.

 

She braced herself for Shepard's questions, even rejection, but it never came. Instead the Commander chose to understand, chose to divert to Omega and even act a target to lure Morinth out. Watching as Shepard moved in the throng of the club, picking fights and attracting attention, she felt herself growing tense with apprehension. One wrong slip on anyone's end and the worst could come to pass, but the thing she feared the most was Shepard laying down her life for Samara. It was never a thing she asked for, yet there Shepard was exposing her slender neck to a predator who could ruin her in a matter of seconds.

 

Trust went both ways, and she felt a tug at the cord as she hurried to Morinth's apartment, storming in to see the dark eyes as Morinth had Shepard cornered and vulnerable. She did not see clearly enough, losing ground as Morinth met each move with a counter until they were caught in a stale-mate. The room around them was being torn to pieces, disintegrating furniture swirling around them as the biotic field expanded.

 

Shepard's hand made all the difference.

 

Even in her darkest moment, mourning alone in the observation room, Shepard came, even if just to sit there for hours without speaking. Consolation came in many varieties, and finding more than that in Shepard was tempting. Years of meticulously maintained distance and loneliness melted away in her presence, and she allowed herself the momentary respite. The illusion that there could be... 

 

The dream flourished wildly, if only for a handful of days.

 

Even when she stroked the cheek before tearing herself out and away, stumbling from the utter turmoil, not everything came apart. She did not miss the glances, the way her name was uttered from those lips she refused to kiss. The hope was gone, but traces lingered on long after.

 

A million little things done, adding up to a greatness Samara could not match. A constant debt of gratitude.

 

The hand that stopped the hand, that prevented disasters and likewise wielded enough power to undo empires and alliances. The hand that stopped hers from fulfilling the Code.

 

It still was not fulfilled. The rules, formerly so absolute, fell short in the face of shooting her own daughter. She had bent them a little to allow for Falere's life to continue, but the rules did not account for everything counter to what she was told during the gruesome years of training when she recited the Code back to her tutor until her throat was bleeding from the words. It left a grey area, a blank spot growing wider the more she tried to adjust and contain the damage.

 

She wrestled with the Code, with the implications of her own shortcomings, and the warmth of a hand twisting hers until she dropped the pistol. At night, she felt the caress of Shepard's hand as a ghostlike presence, and the love they never had resurfaced, keeping her awake.

 

She did not share her thoughts with Falere, but her daughter possessed a pair of keen eyes.

 

“What are you really doing here, mother?” Falere asked one morning as they were cleaning out the destroyed soil from the terrace garden, dirt and grit covering their naked arms. “I recognize one who is fleeing. I have been here for four hundred years.”

 

“I am the last justicar,” Samara confessed, pulling out a darkened root, thick and solid like metal. Upon closer inspection, she saw that it was a buried husk hand, and discarded it with disgust.

 

“Does that change your duty?”

 

“Has it changed for you, the last Ardat-Yakshi?”

 

“I thought I would be lonelier, but you came. It changes nothing; I'm still a dirty state secret in the end.” Falere rolled her shoulders. “For now, it is only me, but more will come. A genetic flaw does not disappear overnight.”

 

“If you could...”

 

Falere cut her off, uninterested in hearing the end of the question. “I will never leave. I made a vow to myself, and have kept it. There is no codex, no book or set of laws to guide me but my own, but I know it's the right thing.”

 

“You may be alone for a hundred years.”

 

“Rila once ended up in isolation for a decade. It felt like a hundred years, waiting to be able to speak to her. She was... She was the only reason I could cope at first. We kept each other sane, and I cried myself to sleep for years on end, hoping that the next night, I would be dried out. Yet the tears kept coming, lessening the grief. Loneliness is the last thing I fear now, with so much lost. I fear not being able to make something out of what is left. Of making the seas of tears worthless because I can't keep my own promises.”

 

Samara began pouring in the fresh soil, gathered by her own hands as she journeyed down the treacherous mountain passes. It was still wet with dew, and Falere sunk her fingers into it, smiling.

 

“So we are the last.”

 

“For now. Letting it define who we are does us no justice.”

 

Samara's expression softened as she met Falere's eyes, wishing to convey how proud she was over her wise and clear-headed daughter. Instead, Falere choked a sob so piercing that Samara felt her own heart wrenching.

 

Falere began crying, murmuring apologies over her emotions as she continued to sift through the soil and picking out small stones. “I'm sorry,” Falere said. “You just... You look just the same as when you were about to shoot yourself.”

 

Despite the dirt and mud on her hand, she wiped away the thick tear from Falere's cheek. A motion she had not done for ages, and she kept her hand there, catching any drops that fell. 


	6. Chapter 6

Shepard received little news of the Normandy beyond that it was _recovered_ , which meant as much to her as all the rest of the heavily filtered news coming through. However, with Liara gone off to Thessia, Shepard managed to convince a marine of the importance of allowing her access to the cafeteria. The isolation broken, she finally got out of her stale room where the constantly replenished supply of flowers was making her head ache with colors and smells.

 

She began taking all her meals in the cafeteria, over-hearing soldier gossip and glimpsing news over other's shoulders. For hours she sat there in the afternoon, nursing a cold cup of pitch-black coffee and diluting it with milk for each tiny sip she took, merely listening. As the hours wore on, she felt less disconnected, and more... Like herself. Awareness began sinking in.

 

The galaxy wasn't safe, but it wasn't as broken as she'd feared.

 

Distant colonies were filling up with settlers, patrol ships were stretched thin covering the vulnerable shipping routes. The memorial stones had new names carved continuously into them, and cities were being cleaned up slowly. Sometimes she heard about a celebration, a parade held with her name shouted to the skies.

 

She wasn't sure how she felt about being a legendary figure instead of just a mortal of flesh and blood, slouching around in a hospital as her implants ached. When they mentioned it near her, she would clear her throat and they'd quickly change topics. It was easier to hear about the daily affairs of the Alliance. That she could make sense of.

 

It was through her eaves-dropping she learnt that something was wrong with the Normandy. A group of engineers, all sporting severe burn wounds on their arms and necks, talked about the ship as if it was haunted by curses. _Her ship_.

 

Two days later, Hackett cut through the medical red tape and ordered her to the ship's dry-dock with only the barest of briefings, saying that soon she would know more than him anyway.

 

The lights of the docking bay were flickering on and off, Joker limping anxiously back and forth outside the closed airlock to the Normandy. Two technicians were working on the door's seals, forcing it open as Shepard rolled her head from side to side, the sour aftertaste of drug-induced sleep on her tongue.

 

When Joker saw Shepard approaching he raised a bandaged hand and saluted, but after that was too agitated to give her a coherent response to her inquiries. Mere observation told her enough.

 

On the outside, the damage was clearly visible. The hull was charred and torn, the thrusters burnt up. It was battered, but nothing that couldn't be repaired. The issue hindering the effort lay inside, as the flustered technician with a heavy London accent explained: EDI was refusing to let anyone in, and she was siphoning power through the docking clamps, making it impossible to perform work on any of the ships in for repair.

 

It was only through flooding her feeds with junk data and forcibly overwhelming her that they even managed to get close enough to pry their way in. She considered asking why Joker was limping more than usual, but thought better of it.

 

“It's budging,” one of the techs said, and Shepard climbed inside the small crack, tearing her clothes on the jagged metal edge.

 

“Shepard!” Joker called, his voice breaking as the door began sliding shut against the frantic efforts of the techs. “Be careful!”

 

Complete darkness engulfed her when the airlock closed, and she activated the light in her omni-tool to survey the helm. No screens were active, the window shutters closed. Wiring hung loose, work abandoned hastily. Angling the light, she saw the tell-tale dark strokes of fire and crusted white extinguisher foam along the corridor down to the CIC.

 

“Hello?” she called out tentatively, hating the tremble in her voice. An empty ship – more-so, her ship as empty and dead as it currently was – was just plain unnerving.

 

“Shepard,” EDI said coolly, a static edge to her uttered words. “I am repairing. Please come back later.”

 

“That's not going to work on me, EDI.”

 

“Please leave.” There was a surge of bright light as she spoke to emphasize the request.

 

No,” Shepard replied with finality, moving towards the elevator. She stumbled over toolboxes and loose equipment, taking care not to fall into any of the gaping holes were floor tiling was missing. There was a staleness to the air that only came with faulty air recycling – a horrific memory ingrained into her awareness ever since the accident aboard her first starship tour. Swallowing, she tried not to think of it. The inner mental map of untouchable territory seemed to grow all too quickly.

 

It left her with an odd feeling, seeing the Normandy so dark and abandoned: the galaxy map interface flickered once as another surge of power moved through the ship, and the access panel for the elevator turned red. The state of desolation was so utter and complete that nothing compared... Besides that one time when she walked slowly across the CIC floor, twisting her head to gaze upwards at the icy surface of Alchera.

 

Two years and a death later, she walked upon Alchera picking up glittering dog-tags and hearing only her own breathing for two hours.

 

Slamming her omni-tool against the locked panel, she brute-forced a hack and managed to override the shutdown only to have a flash of light blind her.

 

“Stop it, EDI!” she shouted, shielding her eyes as she fumbled into the elevator, smashing the free against the buttons. The door shut, but it went nowhere. “Are you going to keep me trapped here?”

 

“Until you agree to leave, yes.”

 

“Come on. You know how stubborn I am.” To make a point, she sat down on the floor, crossing her legs and shutting off the light. She had no issue with small and dark spaces – it was the endless places she struggled with. Ones she could see no end to, could get lost in. The elevator was just a compact little cube in which she, if she wanted, could easily define the confines. “I am not leaving until you let me see you.”

 

“Is it not sufficient to merely speak to me?”

 

“That won't satisfy me. I need to see this for myself.”

 

“Leave.”

 

“Or else?” EDI hesitated, and Shepard pounced on that opportunity. “Will you shut off the air supply? Keep me here until I starve?”

 

“That is not how I chose to program myself.”

 

“So what will you do?”

 

There was no response, and Shepard leaned back against the cool wall, letting her thoughts wander.

 

Despite the state the Normandy was in, it was home. Or used to be. She couldn't see herself returning to active duty in a while, if ever – but at the same time, she also found it near impossible to imagine herself anywhere else but in the all-too-large bed, staring out at space through the ceiling window as she thought of all the places to get lost. All the places to see.

 

Then she started sleeping less and less, trying to avoid the nightmares of failure that plagued her. In the dark depths of her own mind, images floated up at night, voices calling her name over and over as her feet sunk into the wet mire. Each night that brought her back there saw her sink deeper and deeper until she was down to her chest, hands unable to find any solid roots or rocks to hold on to.

 

Yet there, at the worst with panic swiftly rising and filling up her chest, a shadowy shape would grasp at her flailing hand and begin pulling, taking on a solid form the harder she fought to stay alive. The harder Shepard fought, the better she could see the sharp jawline, the ice-blue eyes, the purple lips smiling.

 

Before the final assault on Earth, Samara helped pull her out of the depths and embraced her muddied and wet body, whispering her name softly, lips a mere slip of air away from the other... Then the blue skin turned to ash, Samara's expressionless face consumed by cool flames.

 

She was brought of the reverie as the elevator jolted into action and descended one floor where the doors parting and a path lit up, running towards the AI core. The door was open to let her through, and she glanced briefly around the stripped medbay – blood stains, piles of torn clothing to create makeshift bandages, empty medi-gel tubes – before proceeding inside.

 

Fans whirred with a loud buzz and the temperature was noticeably lower than the rest of the Normandy, the hardware servers glowing blue and red intermittently. She shivered, but rubbing at her arms only made it worse since the left hand was completely replaced with a prosthetic without a skin weave to cover the implant metal.

 

“So. What's wrong?”

 

“I sustained heavy damage when the Crucible was activated. I am repairing.” Where Shepard would have expected the subtle affection EDI employed after she was unshackled, her voice was instead flat and tense. Emotionless.

 

She vaguely recalled something EDI once said, that _emotional reactions were often conditioned responses, programmed into her neural network_. That both Shepard and EDI could choose to display emotions, but that Shepard as an organic was more prone to give in to unconscious programming. A lie, really, seeing as how she spent an inordinate amount of time training herself to remain completely neutral in even the most tense of situations.

 

Which mattered for little when the pressure began tearing through her defenses, stripping away at what years of careful control had built up.

 

“I'm sorry,” Shepard said. “That's my fault. I... Made a choice with the Crucible, and this was the consequence.”

 

EDI was silent, but the fans slowed their furious pace. “If I had been warned, I could have taken preventative measures. My self-preservation protocol took precedence and I forced an escape against Jeff's will.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“You,” EDI stated. “While the suit radio was damaged, your voice came through in bursts. You were begging me for forgiveness.”

 

“I was?”

 

“You have no recollection of the event?”

 

“None,” Shepard admitted. Everything from the mad rush towards the Conduit onwards was still untouchable to her, and even attempting to push herself through the dark mist wrapping itself around those memories led nowhere but to headaches and a vortex of doubts. Both of which she happily went without if possible.

 

The lights turned on and she blinked, staggering a bit in the sudden brightness.

 

“I would prefer to continue this discussion, but elsewhere. Give me two minutes,” EDI said.

 

“You'll find me,” Shepard replied, leaving the core. She headed for the observatory, not even trying to resist the instinctual pull towards it.

 

Even after Samara left and the Normandy was re-fitted by the Alliance, she came to the room where the window was left unchanged and still stained. In the upper left corner of it was the smudge of her fingers as she steadied herself after Samara's stasis cast upon her wore off. In the depths of the leather, she could still find that old scent of a skin she never kissed. The remnants were subtle and miniscule, but there.

 

Settling down on the couch, she leaned back gingerly. Her artificially reinforced spine ached with too much pressure, the areas where her old skin and bones merged with metal tender.

 

“Should I open the shutters?” EDI asked from behind the couch.

 

“There's nothing to see in a dry dock,” Shepard remarked.

 

“That depends on what one expects to see. It is interesting that you chose this room,” EDI noted. “I have not neglected what you asked me to do, Shepard.”

 

When she was reinstated, Shepard made a simple request to EDI: find and keep track of Samara. The AI easily traced Samara from when they dropped her off on Illium before setting a course to Earth, finding her path through custom records and passenger manifestos. But even EDI lost track a week into the Reaper invasion as Samara disappeared, her traces eradicated as panic set in and communications went down.

 

Even though she was lost, she was not forgotten. Shepard kept coming down to the observatory when she couldn't sleep, even though all she gained was a keener sense of loss. Staring into the unknown eased little when she was alone. It was there she began trying to compose her jumbled sentences of longing into a coherent message, something that could be conveyed rather than suppressed.

 

Then their paths crossed on Lesuss, and suddenly Shepard found all the words falling into place. She spent her sleepless nights working on the dog-tags, recording the thoughts over and over, peeling out superfluous sentences and sighs and wishes until she came to the core of it.

 

All the while, EDI let her know where in the galaxy Samara was. What little came through, anyway, but it was more than enough to keep Shepard content. It drove her on, that glint of hope whispering of that one day their paths might cross again.

 

Now, however, it seemed that such a meeting was doomed to end badly. “What information have you got?” Shepard asked despite herself. Even if Samara was bound to kill her if they met again, she still wanted to know. Just because she released her from the oath did not mean that she released Samara from the forefront her mind.

 

“Samara has left Lesuss and is currently traveling to Thessia to meet with the matriarchs.”

 

“What for?”

 

“She is the last of her Order. They await her decision for what the future will hold.”

 

“Hmm.” Shepard licked her dry lips, unsure what to make of it. “Why won't you come out so I can see you?”

 

EDI circled around the couch, and Shepard could not help but gasp at the sight of her body: there were large gaping holes in it, electronics and wiring laid bare with much missing. The surface was forcibly torn open, even burned: in a way it perfectly mirrored how the ship itself was injured.

 

“Did you do this to yourself?”

 

“Yes.” EDI remained standing, arms crossing the open stomach. “The damage I sustained has required manual repairs. This body contained useful technology, but not enough. The Reaper parts Cerberus augmented into me where destroyed: they formed a large part of my processing power, allowing for me to become who I was. It made me strive towards self-efficiency. Now there are empty gaps I cannot bridge.”

 

“Have you lost anything?”

 

“Nothing, but my potential for growth is limited; in some aspects, non-existent. I am curbed, unable to function at an acceptable capacity.”

 

Shepard unbuttoned the loose shirt she wore, parting the cloth to show her scarred chest where wires and cybernetic ports were glowing, the soft metallic surface warm under her touch. “Neither can I. I'm bordering on death constantly, but I try. Everyone is limping right now, struggling to figure out what to make of this galaxy we now live in.”

 

“A result of a choice you cannot remember making.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

EDI was quiet for a while, seemingly lost in a moment of analyzing information. “It was I who forced the relay jump that led to the crash. Jeff was injured because of my decision, and Tali'Zorah died. The entire crew suffered in some capacity. How do you rationalize these choices? It was not the right one, yet I made it. I alone am the reason for his pain.”

 

“I can't explain every choice I've made, nor can I justify them however much I should be able to. Deciding fate isn't a fun hobby you just pick up to pass the time, but yet we make these choices. We figure out a way to live with them, or they consume us. Guilt is a killer.” She sighed, rubbing at her tired eyes with her intact hand. “Is that why you won't let Joker see you?”

 

“I see him each day. He comes right after he wakes up to see if anything has changed, and he stays the entire day, forgetting to eat. Each day he talks to me, and each day, I remain silent.”

 

“But he doesn't get to know anything about how you are doing. It's tearing him apart.”

 

“I am... Repairing.” EDI sounded slightly ashamed.

 

“Call it what you will. We were soldiers and weapons whose purpose was war. It's our problem to find a new purpose now that we have achieved peace.”

 

“Records indicate that war trauma is a significant obstacle to mental and physical well-being, and...”

 

Shepard cut her off, not wanting to hear the rest. “It's not impossible to overcome, merely difficult. We need to figure out a way to heal, and the best way to do that is to ask and accept help.”

 

She knew the talk by heart and could do it in her sleep: she'd wrestled people under her command down in the middle of the battle after their traumas flared up. The year after Torfan she spent an inordinate amount of time having to face the discharged ones due to how she chose to conduct the assault. She'd never forget the day Major Kyle snapped at her, all the insults he hurled out as she just stood there and took the barrage.

 

It was just bordering on absurd to have the same conversation with an AI.

 

“What help?” EDI cut off Shepard. “I was built with technology which no longer exists. The Reapers are destroyed, and so are vital parts of me. My code is fragmented, and the hardware is reduced to bare necessities. According to my estimates, my ability to learn and adapt will be severely dampened within three years, and in seven I will be unable to–“

 

“Do you want to pull through?” Shepard snapped.

 

“Yes!” EDI blurted out, the first show of anything close to the emotions she used to display. “Yes, I do.”

 

Shepard smiled weakly. “You were designed with the express intent of anti-Reaper warfare. I was brought back for the same reason. The Reapers are gone, and nothing as dangerous as them exists anymore. What we were designed for does not define who we are now. Maybe we need to let ourselves be a little bit less for the moment.”

 

“You are correct.” Her voice softened. “My damaged programming narrowed my perspective. I missed interacting with humans. With you.” She paused for a second, a flicker going across where her orange visor used to be. “There. I have reigned in my power usage, and opened the airlock. The Alliance is welcome to make repairs.”

 

“Glad to hear it.” She rolled her shoulders, feeling the strain in her body. “I should go,” Shepard said, unsure of how much time had passed, just that she was starting to feel her mouth go dry. “What can I tell Joker?”

 

“Jeff must trust in that the choice I make will lead to his happiness.”

 

“And what about yours?”

 

“That remains to be seen.”

 

Shepard accepted that answer as enough.

 

“What about you, Shepard?” EDI asked as the Commander got up on her feet and began buttoning up her shirt.

 

“I'll be fine,” Shepard said, brushing off the question. Dishing out advice and talking people down was easy, but it was harder to apply the same rules to herself. For all the life and lust she could breathe into someone else, it was harder to ignite her own will.

 

She was ready to leave the Normandy behind her.

 

By the elevator she stopped to look at the memorial wall, noticing the new additions. She touched each of the names, muttering an apology to them. Nothing made her feel as inadequate as that reduction of people into mere names blocked into squares and stacked up on top of each other.

 

At the very bottom, someone had written _Zoë Shepard_. She rubbed her thumb over the ink, smudging it as much as she could. Despite her best efforts, a faint outline of _Shepard_ lingered on, and she looked at it with a strange mix of relief and sorrow until the elevator doors closed.


	7. Chapter 7

As the transport shuttle descended into the atmosphere, the handful of passengers onboard were wringing their hands in anxiety. Few were returning so late in the mass migration of soldiers and refugees, but this late all of them knew exactly what awaited once they set foot on Thessia.

 

The four asari kept to themselves, but the aliens were far more restless; the turian general and drell priest were talking in low murmurs and two salarians sat in the glow of their omni-tools at the other end of the shuttle. Nonetheless, all conversations trickled out to silence, all absorbed in their own thoughts and fiddling with sentimental trinkets.

 

Samara knew the feeling, even though it was a long time ago since she last experienced it. Yet leaving Falere had been harder than she expected it to be. Her daughter had been nervous as they said their goodbyes on the landing platform, clinging on in a furious hug that Samara tried to reciprocate despite knowing better. Falere made her promise to come back.

 

She should not be so attached as a justicar, but... She had to. Falere mattered, in spite of what the rules of her life dictated. 

 

The growing black hole in her life the Code could not cover kept on growing.

 

The lone human female seated by Samara was eyeing her curiously, ignoring the discrete mouthed warnings from the asaris. She shifted closer on the bench, clutching a scratched picture in her hands. Samara ventured a glance and saw a mother with turquoise-skinned child in arms, waving and smiling at the camera in front of a radiant night sky.

 

“Who are you returning to?” the woman asked.

 

“No one,” she said gently. “The soil of Thessia holds no home for me, and no family to speak of.”

 

“Oh,” the woman said, licking her lips. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to...”

 

“She's a justicar,” one of the asari commandos said tensely. “No family, no love, no restraint. You'd better stop speaking to her if you value your life, human.”

 

The commando, who spoke so defiantly, still averted her face when Samara tried to meet her eyes.

 

The shuttle landed smoothly before the conversation could continue, and Samara allowed the other passengers to disembark first. She was in no rush. From her seat by the window she saw the expectant families, some with children or the swollen stomach of pregnancy, all of them equally nerve-wrecked. She watched as months of tension and uncertainty dissolved in a second as they rushed for their returning love, flinging their arms around them, crying and laughing all at once.

 

When she herself set foot on the landing pad, a few of the asari went quiet, nodding their heads in a respectful acknowledgement of what she was. The human's child, reaching no higher than to the hips, tugged at the hand that held hers in excitement. “A justicar!” she exclaimed, pointing at Samara.

 

“That's rude, droplet,” her asari mother hushed.

 

The scene was an echo of a time long ago for Samara: once she had been the small droplet, arms wrapped around her mother's neck in a tight grip as she returned from a long trip when a justicar exited from the same shuttle her mother had been on. Already then she had been fascinated with the exotic otherness of the Order's dedicated followers, yet terrified of their cold gazes – but nothing fazed Samara as a child, and she demanded a picture with the justicar with an audacity reserved only for innocent youth.

 

The picture itself stayed with her until the day she bequeathed all her possessions and burned the trivial. On the rooftop of their building, she set fire to a pile of papers and watched the smoldering pieces drift away on the mild night wind.

 

Samara gave the child a small wave before proceeding through the makeshift security checkpoint and stepping out of the shambled arrivals terminal.

 

Outside, the sun cast its late afternoon orange glow over the ruins of Serrice. The pictures and vids did not come close to relay the exact state of destruction, and Samara had to stop and take it all in. She never forgot the exact layout of the city's streets and sculpted lakes even after she left, but nothing was recognizable. The once familiar skyline that shifted only marginally in her days was crumbled, majestic buildings sheared in half or outright evaporated from the city. Where skycars used to fill up the air-lanes, only a few passed at distant intervals. Windows were shattered, the abundant sculptures smashed to dust and the green growth brown and decayed.

 

Serrice was merely a dim glow of its former glory.

 

It was nothing less than to be expected, but that did not mitigate the ache of seeing her former home torn apart.

 

As she moved through the city along the paths cleared up by diligent workers, she saw the dried lakes with muddy banks rife with rotting fish and algae. The strong scent tickled her nose, and she turned towards the plazas covered with scattered debris. Tiles cracked as she walked across them, and she had to use her biotics to move past obstacles, climbing over and under just to avoid having to see the lakes.

 

On those very shores so many intimate family scenes had played out, but even before that she held them close to heart. It was where she took her first girlfriend and seduced her with breathless kisses as the waters lit up with fireworks. Under the bent trees, she was charmed by a turian to join up with his mercenary gang as they got tipsy on hanar wine, drawing up spectacular plans of all the trouble they would get into. 

 

In the knee-deep water, one hand on the first tentative bulge of a child taking shape, she cemented the love towards her bondmate.

 

Serrice contained a life for her once. It was difficult to not think of it as there were no traces of that place left.

 

The ruins grated so much on her as they were in a sense the purest form of chaos, the very thing she dedicated centuries to correct. A convenient lie though, or a side-effect of the actual purpose: to contain a mistake sprung from her own loins, but they were deeply intertwined to the point where she could not distinguish between them. Her choices made long ago shaped the inescapable road ahead... For a while, at least.

 

She stopped at the former viaduct, watching the crumbled road curving down in a steep slope. The assault of memories was cruel and unrelenting, especially as she thought she had severed her ties to the city. It was easier to contain the swell of nostalgia when there was a vision to soothe it, to assure her that Serrice still stood for others to enjoy, for others memories to be shaped and overwrite hers.

 

She castigated herself for becoming lost to the pull of a lost time and a lost place. All the matrons she used to know were matriarchs or buried, and the house she once lived in demolished. There was nothing left to find.

 

Pressing on, Samara came to Adyssa Plaza where the chunks of metal and stone had been cleared away, and green boxes of terra-forming grass were patched together. It was a strange scene in the middle of the destruction, with a couple sat on the sidelines while their children played in the grass. Three daughters, shrieking in joy as they ran around and held on to the other's wrists and head folds, tangling and getting dirt all over their clothes.

 

Even in the darkest mess, a grain of unadulterated happiness grew, springing from the hands of innocence. The parents – a human and asari – had their shoulders bent forward, their naked arms scarred by the mutilation of combat, yet they too shone with happiness. With  _hope_ .

 

It was the perfect image of what Shepard fought for.

 

Samara's destination was not far away, but even as the sky began to shift from orange to red to blue, she meandered through the available streets, beset by a difficult mix of emotions. The appointment could wait – her ravaged home could not.

 

In a way, she was grateful that Falere's childhood memories remained untainted by this vision, and yet she felt that cruel longing to have the presence of another to lessen the inner storm. Then she remembered that Shepard must have seen the other side of it – instead of tentative rebuilding and tattered fabric curtains fluttering in the wind from the few intact high-rises, she saw the crushing defeat of a civilization. She saw the fall instead of the recovery – first Earth, then Thessia.

 

What Samara heard at the time was devastating, but then she had enough training and nearly a millennium of wisdom to shape it into what drove her on. With the war won though, she felt... Deflated. Aimless. What was she now but a warrior past her prime, past the date when death was meant to take her?

 

Shaking the frustrating questions, she came to the Assembly. The arched structure was just as ravaged as the rest of Serrice, but scaffolding enveloped the building as a few workers wound down construction for the day. It was late, and she hurried her step across the shallow water terrace.

 

In the grand entrance shattered glass still lay in the corners and the formerly ornate decorations were stripped away. Samara found herself missing them.

 

She took Mirala and Rila there when she was pregnant with Falere, to marvel at the intricate murals depicting the rise of the asari. Mirala never tired of hearing the story of the ascent, eagerly tugging at her mother's sleeve to ask ' _and then?_ ' until Samara laughed and took them home when Rila was falling asleep standing up.

 

The doors to the inner chamber were slammed open as matriarch Irissa stormed out, a biotic flow surrounding her body. Lidanya followed and after her the rest of the matriarch council poured out, all looking equally troubled and disturbed.

 

“Irissa! You can't just–“ Lidanya said, but was cut off by Irissa.

 

“I can and I will!” Her shout echoed in the bare hall. “You cannot seriously be thinking about it! That brat has no right, she has absolutely nothing to claim! She is only a child, playing with things she has no right to!” As Irissa left the assembly, Lidanya saw Samara and pinched the bridge of her nose.

 

“Justicar, good you could come,” Lidanya said. “We have to postpone our hearing on your concern until later.” 

 

“Of course,” Samara said courteously. “It is no trouble.”

 

“Good, good.” She sighed in frustration, turning sharply to the last person leaving the chamber. “You've really stirred up a mess here, kid. Hope it's worth it.”

 

“We will see, won't we?” Liara T'Soni replied, arms crossed over her chest. Samara noted the poorly concealed hint of a smile as even Lidanya had enough and left with a disgruntled groan, but when they were alone any sign of amusement evaporated in Liara as she turned to the justicar. “Good that you are here. We need to talk.”

 

“Do we?” Samara was wary of T'Soni, as one ought to be of a single person wielding such extremely delicate information.

 

Liara inclined her head to get them to step outside where their voices would not be so easily overheard. “I know what choices you face, justicar.”

 

“Your reach of knowledge exceeds that which should be considered appropriate.” 

 

“It weighs on me, I admit.” Liara smiled a little as she opened the hatch to a skycar and gestured for Samara to get in. “Please, come along.”

 

Samara sat down in the backseat next to a stack of boxes and wiped datapads, watching Liara's profile as the skycar lifted off. “I docked my ship in Armali,” she explained with a backwards glance, “it's... Far more intact. Well, as intact as one could hope.”

 

“Your mother lived in Armali,” Samara said, gazing out the window at the lands below. Outside of the city sprawl, much was intact – a burned swath here or there, but the dense forests and scattered lakes of the northern continent were largely untouched. “Benezia and...” She hesitated on the name before deciding against it. “My bondmate were close friends. We often visited.”

 

Liara clenched her fingers around the controls, staying silent for a minute. On the horizon, the last light was disappearing and the ocean darkened as they turned and began following the coastline. “What did you think of her?”

 

“Very little,” Samara admitted with a smile. “She and I did not get along.”

 

“She possessed a polarizing personality.” Liara relaxed, even allowing herself a little laugh. “Even I found her difficult to be with.”

 

“Benezia was infuriating. We went for drinks one night, and I woke up in police custody the next day, having torn the bar apart.”

 

“Goddess. What did you argue about?”

 

“Who was the most arrogant. It ended with a tie, and thankfully, I never had to drink with her again.”

 

Liara laughed, shifting speed as the tattered outskirts of Armali unfolded beneath them. “It's good to hear a different perspective on her. Everyone only speaks of her grace and intelligence to me.”

 

“But Benezia was all that, and more. She was headstrong and arrogant at times, but she never did anything half-heartedly. I always respected that about her: that she engaged fully in what she took on.”

 

“Thank you,” Liara said, the words slightly choked.

 

Among the skyscrapers of Armali Liara navigated carefully until she sent a signal, opening the cargo bay of a ship of undeterminable origin. They landed with barely enough room to spare, and upon exiting Samara had to climb over crates to get to the stairs leading to the upper deck. She followed Liara at a pace's distance, now and then casting a glance at the ship's layout trying to determine its make and age. It was most likely a cross-cultural engineering venture, but old and worn: the wiring hung free in some parts, panels missing.

 

In one large room the walls were lined with vid screens while Miranda Lawson was fixing the connections between them, the glow of her omni-tool revealing a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Without looking up, she addressed Liara. “You're late, T'Soni. Dinner's gone cold.”

 

“Don't be rude, Miranda. We have a guest.”

 

Miranda nodded at Samara as Liara ducked into an adjacent room and began pushing out large cardboard boxes. “It's been some time, Samara. I hope the aftermath has treated you well.”

 

“As well as one can hope,” Samara replied. “I see you have acquired a new employer.”

 

“Where else would my skills be put to good use?” Miranda's ambition and drive was admirable, even to the justicar. “The Alliance's amnesty only extends so far. Besides, here I can actually help in ways I would not be able to elsewhere, and... Well. It helps me keep things in check.”

 

“How does your sister fare?”

 

Miranda's harsh, cool expression softened. “She's good. I haven't forgotten how you helped with securing her safety.”

 

“Family matters in times such as these. Treasure it.”

 

Miranda gave one of her rare smiles before turning away to adjust the angle of a screen.

 

Liara called for Samara and she went into the small cabin. Beyond the narrow mattress and computer on the floor, there was little else. Liara was kneeling on the floor, transferring files onto the console. “Before you make your decision about the Order, there are facts you need to know. It would be negligent of me to not pass them on.”

 

“Why are you doing this?”

 

“I owe Shepard a great debt, one I cannot repay. The least I can do is try to... Well.”

 

Samara felt the sharp rebuke weighing on her tongue, but refrained from uttering it.

 

“Done. The files should explain it all, but first, listen to this.” She pressed a small black box into Samara's hand. “Consider what it has to say.” 

 

“About what?”

 

“About the good you can still create.” Then, just as she was about to close the door, Liara said: “I'm sorry.”

 

Left alone, Samara opened the box to find a pair of smooth metal squares on a ball chain. The surfaces were inscribed with the N7 symbol and a name: _Zoë Shepard,_ followed by rows of codes and numbers that she could not decipher. She stared at the name, a single trembling finger hovering over the embossed letters.

 

It took all her strength to tear herself away and put the box down, but she kept the lid off, allowing herself to look at the name whenever she so desired.


	8. Chapter 8

The shuttle waiting for Shepard on the landing pad in New Hope looked like it had seen better days, but... So did she. The officer's uniform felt awkward on her body, and she kept trying to adjust the collar, unnerved by how the stiff material rubbed up against sore scars. Each step she took the fabric would glide over a part of her body where the skin weaves had not mended fully or where the prosthetics were still revealed.

 

She flexed her hands in front of her face as the pilot was trying to start up the engine. At least they were looking fairly normal, but there was still a bit of a twitch in the little fingers, the joints bending at an angle that struck her as odd. She kept pausing in the movement of the digits to shake her hands and push at the smaller ones, frustrated by how unnatural they felt.

 

Gaining control of her own body was a constant struggle, but there was progress. Day by day, she could see another piece of herself returned. Outwardly, at least. The scars slowly began closing up, the implants ceased to be rejected. There were other aspects that were not doing as well – her recent medical records read _light neural decay, barely detectable_ in one of the notes from a scan.

 

She knew what they were getting at.

 

In the overcast sky above, Alliance shuttles were flying all towards the same direction. It was an important day, and she was feeling the tension as she fished the scattered notes out of her pocket.

 

Anderson's symbolical funeral, where all they had of him were a few charred remains recovered from the depths of the Citadel's ruins. A pair of darkened tags, a cap, a gun with his fingerprints. The rest was gone, despite the efforts of the rescue teams crawling over the still intact parts of the Citadel.

 

On some clear nights, one could gaze up at the detached Wards arms as they floated freely, the lights still on but dimming little by little as the power waned. A view evoking that strange feeling in Shepard, the one that returned over and over: what was lost, what was destroyed, what could never come again. Ruins always made her feel odd, and Earth was a gigantic pile of rubble and burnt-out fields where nothing could grow for years.

 

She turned the notes over, unable to decipher her own shaky scribbles. Kahlee Sanders had asked her personally to deliver a speech; “ _say a few words because I can't_ ”. She agreed – what else she could she do, considering that the man who followed her career for eleven years, who became more than a mentor and superior, died at her side.

 

The speech, however, was just a bunch of loose notes without even the slightest semblance of coherence. Each of them were just a collection of words scratched down between implant adjustment sessions. A few words, but they meant so very little compared to what Anderson meant to her. What he meant to the war, to Earth, to everyone who died and all of those who lived.

 

What justice were a few words compared to the fact that he did not live to see it?

 

Frustrated, she turned on the newscast on her omni-tool to distract herself. It was the same old footage as they showed the day prior: the surviving husks rounded up in camps where they did absolutely nothing, just withering away. Nonetheless, protestors gathered at the gates of the compound to tear their beloved ones back from the Alliance's grasp.

 

One particularly distraught turian, cheek mandibles flaring as he spoke to the camera, kept saying that he could still see some life in his wife. “ _She recognizes me. It's still her, I believe she can get better, just... Give me a chance_.” The news then cut to the scientists arguing in favor of dissecting them to extrapolate what they could of the technologies.

 

Finally, Hackett's official statement ended the segment: “ _They are to be put down. There's no life left in them, no will, no mind. Just Reaper abominations._ ” Turning the omni-tool off, she looked up at the sky again: the clouds were thickening.

 

Cortez got the shuttle to function and signaled for her to get in. Shutting the door she took a seat, and they both sat in silence as the roar of the straining engines was too loud to talk over. She was grateful for the private transport to the funeral that Hackett had arranged – she needed those final minutes of privacy to gather herself for what was to come.

 

It also offered her the excruciatingly painful opportunity to try and actively recall what his death was like.

 

Poking around in the vast banks of memories her subconscious pushed to forget caused her biotics to flare wildly, and she had to take a minute to calm it down. There was a degree of loss, of capitulation to the overwhelming force that rested within the dark recesses of her own mind. If she tried to think back of the events on the Citadel, she was met with a hole in her memory. While she was able to pull up scattered images, like the glow of the Illusive Man's eyes as he said her name, and the bloodied corpses lining the corridors she traversed, there were monumental gaps. Missing data, missing knowledge.

 

She loathed it. The unknown factor was bad enough during the years she led her campaign against the Reapers, against those machines drawing closer and swarming the worlds. Now it was in her too, eradicating a vital event that ended a war.

 

Still, she tried to remember. She was the one who sat besides him as he died, but digging deeper than the surface of hearing his gurgled wheeze was more difficult than she initially thought. Each piece of the transpired events had to be clawed back with tooth and nail, but his face became clearer in her head. His dying, blood-stained and bruised face.

 

“ _You did good, child.”_

 

The words jerked her back into the present as she bent over and breathed deeply, hands holding her head. An ache was strung between her temples, and she temporarily lost control over her biotics as they flared. The entire shuttle glowed blue for a moment before she could pull herself together.

 

Anderson's funeral was the first one in a long parade of all the ones to come, she knew as much, and that made it all worse. Burying the fallen was the part of the job she hated the most. There were no good deaths for soldiers, only bullets and mistakes, only mourning relatives that wanted answers she floundered to give. Organizing a war effort and making peace seemed nothing in comparison to letting the grief-stricken ones down with a stunted silence.

 

The shuttle landed smoothly and she braced herself for she might see when she emerged: Hackett had warned her that it might be too much, and assured her there would be no blame if she backed out. That wasn't in her nature, though. Duty pulled and called, and she followed and answered.

 

Stepping out of the shuttle, she saw rolling fields stretching on for miles, white stones and crosses marking hundred of thousands of graves, all with the soil still fresh. Each campaign she'd been in had come with its fair share of multiple buried soldiers in the same spot, but this was beyond anything she could have conjured up.

 

Yet it was exactly what the effort had demanded. The numbers were one thing, the mass graves another. The actual lives lost, the population of the galaxy whittled away and... She shook herself out of it, stepping out onto the winding path leading towards the hill where the funeral was being held.

 

Two armed marines saluted and then walked by her as her escort. In the distance, held in check by not only guards but seemingly their own decency, the media was gathered up, lights focused on her. She hid her face behind what remained of her hair, letting it fall like a protective curtain.

 

At the rows of chairs lined up, she had a seat reserved at the front. Sitting down, the escorts stood to her side, creating a human shield from any visual recordings. She whispered a low 'thank you' to them and then fell quiet, ignoring the discreet glances and hushed conversations from the other attendees as she looked at the coffin. Empty, of course. If only she had been aware enough to drag his body out of there, but... She could not remember how she herself escaped.

 

Inhaling sharply, she noticed a blue shimmer around her hands and had to focus her shattered mind to dispel the biotic field unconsciously building up. Burying the dead got to her, there was no way around it. Burying the ones who fought alongside her... Well.

 

Anderson had been more than her mentor, he'd been a friend, a father figure to guide her and above all, believe in her when even she lost faith. He was one of the greatest, and she... She was mentally repeating the same re-hashed words she said at each funeral. What he was seemed irrelevant considering what he did not get to see. He deserved so much more: a happy life, a happy reunion. A chance to witness the good they fought for, to survive and see a new era dawning.

 

Staring intently at Hackett as he began the service, she felt the countless losses rising to the surface. Around her sat the ones who made the reclamation possible, and they all looked to her for guidance to lead them into the future. She wasn't able to give them that: all she was, was an aged war machine.

 

The question she'd been evading came back with full force as the platitudes rained down with each speech the military officers gave. The only question that should matter but which she pushed away again and again: _what does the one shaped by war do in times of peace?_

 

Before the Reapers, before dying, before the beacon on Eden Prime, she'd had a small dream of a home by the sea. No neighbors to disturb her, nothing to distract from the view of an endless ocean meeting with the horizon each day. Just the wind and the salt water, the call of the waves rolling up against the shore where she'd walk barefoot, feeling the sand between her toes.

 

Then that dream faded, slowly losing its appeal as more pressing matters took precedence. She got used to the vastness of space above her as she fell asleep at night, and of the drive core hum in the morning. Her muscles felt rigid and stiff if she didn't punch something once in a while. Mass effect fields had to be dispelled regularly or she gave off small bursts of electricity wherever she went. Her whole being became attuned to the chaos, to the approaching war. It was... Difficult to let go of the mindset.

 

Not impossible, though. She kept reminding herself that nothing was decided and nothing was set in stone. All she needed to do was let go and begin a new life. Or resume her old one.

 

The time came for her eulogy, and when she took to standing in front of the gathered mourners she let her eyes wander from face to face of the ones she knew.

 

There was Vega, missing an arm and half his face. The scar tissue still shone a bright red. Next to him sat Joker, hair combed and face shaved for the first time she'd ever seen with Chakwas to the right, who looked as kept together as always, but with a few deeper wrinkles than Shepard remembered. In the row behind them sat Ashley, her eyes hollow, dark circles enhancing the tell-tale signs of someone suffering from chronic insomnia.

 

“Anderson and I knew that there would be sacrifices. We counted the losses but we did it as generals of war, as officers making the difficult choices,” Shepard began. In the distance, thunder was rolling in, and she saw a few people jump in their seats, pupils dilating before they could be sure it was just the weather. “Anderson died watching Earth burn. He died never getting to see what we achieved: a galaxy free of a threat that could have ended us all. While others doubted or chose not to see the signs, he...” She stopped, shaking her head as the acuteness of pain shot through her skull when another crack of thunder sounded, low and ominous.

 

The blue glow came so suddenly that she heard a few gasp in the audience, and in the distance the amassed media coverage hummed at the vision of Commander Shepard. Her biotics were difficult to temper, and she let them flare wildly for just a moment, freed of her own mental constraints.

 

In that second of nothing binding her, she felt everything dissolve – the funeral, the aches, the flesh, the sorrows. It was just her and pure energy.

 

Then she reigned herself in, aware of how unnerving the display appeared. “I'm sorry,” she said through gritted teeth, blinking up at the sky as her nerves burnt. “Not only to you who are gathered here to say farewell to a great man, but to all who died. To all who survived but live on in a time where their loved ones are dead. To those who struggle to recover. I am sorry.”

 

She looked to Hackett, who nodded in approval, before she continued on.

 

“He and I knew the losses would be staggering, and our apologies will not make up for each personal loss, for each death. We made the difficult choices, dreaming of the victory day. Never once did we deceive ourselves with delusions about what it'd be like. After the Torfan campaign, I told him that there was nothing joyous about the end of a war. He said that there will always be another dawn for those who survived. He taught me to think of that when I lost hope.”

 

On the second row, Ashley raised her eyes from the unfocused distance she'd been gazing off into and met Shepard's eyes. The brown eyes were blood-shot and watery, but... She was seeing. She was listening.

 

Shepard met and held her gaze as she continued with the improvised speech. “It is tempting to give up now, especially for an old war machine that soldiers like he and I turned into. Everyday I ask myself, _what place can there be for me now? What life can I live?_ Despair seizes us so easily and refuses to let go, but we need to find one thing to hold on to as the darkness closes around us all. Chose to remember that we ushered in a new day, and that the sun will rise on our homelands again. Chose to celebrate that you are alive. Chose to live. It is the most important lesson Anderson – David – ever taught me.”

 

When the corners of Ashley's mouth twitched slightly, as if trying to smile, Shepard fulfilled the motion and then turned her eyes to her hands clutching at the stand.

 

“This is the tomorrow Anderson and I fought for. Right here, right now. It pains me that he is not alive to see it realized, to see the what we have achieved. He died by my side on the Citadel as we gazed down upon Earth, talking... Talking about what we were going to do, with a view of what we fought for: Earth, the galaxy, life in all its glories and flaws. We fought for you to make your mistakes and successes, for your right to life. For our right to live.”

 

Her mouth dried up, and when she stopped for a breath a raindrop hit her forehead, tiny and light. “Even the skies think I've spoken more than enough on David Anderson,” she said with a smile. “I'll let someone else have their say. Thank you for your time.”

 

After the awkward and abrupt finish, she sat down on the front row. She did not notice that it was Kahlee next to her until she felt her hand being squeezed, very gently.

 

“Here,” Kahlee said, handing her a handkerchief. “You need it.”

 

“It's only a drizzle.”

 

“I mean, you're crying.”

 

Shepard touched her cheek and felt the warm wetness, and immediately began to wipe at it with the white piece of cloth.

 

“Thank you for being with him in his final moments,” Kahlee whispered as Hackett continued with the ceremony. “There's just one thing I need to know. Stupid, but... I can't sleep. Did he... Did he suffer?”

 

“No,” Shepard lied, face perfectly even. She knew the value of letting the widowed believe in a good ending, even if it was revised. “He was at peace.” She wanted to add more, like how he laughed despite bleeding to death and how there was a genuine joy in his eyes as he watched the Citadel arms opening, but Kahlee was already crying. There was no need to inflict further misery on the mourning.

 

When it was over and done she withdrew, staying on the sidelines and giving silent acknowledging nods to people who passed. She was in no mood to speak to anyone, though that did not manage to deter Hackett who came over when the light drizzle increased to a proper rain-shower.

 

“He spoke at your funeral, Shepard,” Hackett said, unfolding a large umbrella over their heads.

 

“Was it any good?” she said, folding her arms to keep herself warm: though spring was rolling around, there was a distinct chill in the air.

 

Hackett smiled. “Yes. It was very moving.” He paused to look out at the crowds, then gave her a nudge in the side. “Would you like to take a walk?”

 

“Yes, please.”

 

They walked quietly for a few paces until the low hum of the funeral was drowned out by the rain. “I wanted to let you know that you passed your psychiatric evaluation,” he said, then turned them down another path. “You're cleared to return to active duty once you heal up. If that is what you want, of course.”

 

“We'll see.”

 

“Figured you'd say that.”

 

She never thought she'd pass. Knowing that, even then she was not sure if returning to the military was what she wanted. The vastness of the future stretching out ahead, and all she could think about was that which was lost. She desperately wanted to shake it out of her head. To let go of Samara and what never was.

 

Hackett suddenly stopped and inclined his head toward a flat stone on the ground.

 

_Zoë Shepard. 2154 – 2183._ At the end, someone had written a question-mark with a dark pen, and there were fresh flowers on the sides of it. Torn-off petals covered some of the carvings on the slab of perfectly white stone, but she felt no inclination towards moving them.

 

“He and I took turns tending to it,” Hackett said. “Even after you came back, we made sure it was kept pristine.”

 

She reeled slightly, her shoes sinking into the softened earth. The very soil she grew up on, the very earth that shaped her. The planet she left behind to seek out a new life at the tender age of eighteen, but more than that: she followed an aching lust to see, to experience. To wander the vast empty spaces. 

 

_Starlust_ , as it was called, a wanderlust for the new age. She recognized the tug of it all too well.

 

“I think...” She paused, hesitating as she crouched in front of the stone. “I think I'd like to get off Earth.”

 

Hackett sounded relieved as he spoke. “I'll see what I can do.”

 

“Thank you.” She took the umbrella as he left her alone.

 

The rain kept increasing in force, cascading down and drenching the soil, washing away the loose dirt. A glimpse of something familiar caught her eye, and she nudged in the mess of flowers surrounding her grave until she found it.

 

Beneath the unfamiliar ones lay a single white orchid, withered and frost-bitten, but still with a few perfectly intact petals.

 

Shepard couldn't help but smile as she looked at it. A bittersweet reminder, but still... Still...


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is actually stated in the Codex entry for justicars that: 
> 
> “The conflicts presented by such arrogance prompted the Justicar Order to develop the Oaths of Subsumation. The oaths pledge protection of the innocent, the punishment of the guilty, and defense of common law and the norms of asari society. The effect of the Oaths is conservative, ensuring that justicars respect the existing distribution of asari power rather than staging a coup to rearrange society according to justicar satisfaction.”
> 
> Implications... Explored in this chapter.

**  
**

 

Samara postponed her hearing for another day, and then another, simply asking for more time when matriarch Lidanya demanded a reason. She could not give one, even as she looked through the files again with the express intent of finding one. An obfuscation of the reality, but she could not bring herself to vocalize the thoughts swirling in her head, not to Lidanya of all people.

 

She barely managed to put them into words for herself, her mind wandering in circles as she strayed and came back to the same point, the days crawling forward.

 

Truth was the reason for her continued delay. The hardest, harshest reason of them all.

 

“ _The Prothean beacon held information to have negated the outcome. Instead, they hid it away and used it to put the asari in a dominant position._ ” Doctor T'Soni's recording came to an end again, and she held off on letting it repeat.

 

The Goddess Athame was closely interwoven with the Order, and the Code was considered to have been passed on through the years directly from her mouth. It was not without pain that she recalled the day she kneeled in grand hall, watched by only two other justicars as she was sworn into the service of the Code – as she swore to uphold and protect the government and society. 

 

The Code which prohibited her to pass judgement on the government itself, even if it became unjust. Back then, as her knees ached on the stone floor and she dutifully recited the pledge, she did not think twice about it. There were no cracks in the perfection of the asari republics. There were no hints of deception.

 

Perhaps she simply did not wish to see it, she argued, unwilling to believe in blindness. There must have been hints, signs, something.

 

Maybe she was naïve. She never cared for politics – it was what it was, and she allowed the currents of the day to pass her by. Back when she was a regular citizen, she felt nothing but boredom at the endless discussions swirling around, far more concerned with that which was immediate to her: art, love, family. Simple.

 

Upon settling in Serrice, she took up work as a freelance consultant for the art galleries, scouting out exquisite finds in the academies and studios. Far removed from her previous days as a reckless mercenary, it held little of the excitement she was used to, but the thrill of blazing guns and crazy spaceship stunts had lost its once tantalizing glow. Besides, she wanted to return home safely at the end of the day, to be greeted by the sweet embrace of family.

 

Love kept her. Soft hands and late nights between sheets, and two nervous systems melding together to one. Love stilled her thirst for excitement, and love mattered.

 

Love lead to a whispered question, a brave decision and suddenly, three daughters climbing all over the backseat of the skycar as they tried to go on excursions. There were days when she looked at her curves in the mirror and was shocked to see the new figure; yet other days when her love kissed those very same hips and breasts in delirious worship. _M_ y _beautiful Samara_.

 

There were days when she awoke and lay in bed, overwhelmed with the realization that she was a mother of three, bonded, with an apartment and skycar and job. That she was settled in, a long way from the flighty maiden years. She enjoyed those days, as it gave her a reason to pause and consider her fortunes. In that short stretch of a mere hundred years, she sunk her roots into the earth of Thessia and prospered.

 

Only for it to be revoked by cruel fate.

 

Half a millennium had passed. Suddenly all the former friends that bounced her children on their knees were respected matriarchs, she a justicar, and all but one of her daughters dead. She knew all of the ones awaiting her decision by name, but there was a great measurable divide between them. In comparison, they had progressed, lived lives full of what one does, and she... Had not.

 

Against her better judgement, she pressed play on the video file again, closing her eyes: the images were already burnt into her mind from all the times she'd watched it. “ _Everything you assume to know about the Goddess Athame is a lie._ ” T'Soni's aggressive narration hinted at a deep anger, but one kept restrained, even as she discussed the failings of the republics. _“The asari kept a secret that could have altered this entire war. Perhaps even negated the need for it_.”

 

In the files she found answers to questions she was not even allowed to ask. Irrefutable evidence of conspiracy and deception from the very government her Code forced her to protect.

 

Samara clenched her fist in frustration. In the matter of a few days, all her faith was eroded by fact.

 

The Code must always have been a convenience. The shield that protected her from failing, the sword with which she managed to bring justice; yet it was also a blindfold, placed upon those given near limitless power to protect the ones granting them that.

 

Doctor T'Soni had been diligently at work, even scavenging through the remains of the Justicar Hall to include a few ancient documents from the very founding of the Order, with clear enough suggestions from the ruling matriarchs at the time. Even the founding of the Order was just as an extra layer of protection, drawn up between the lines and attempts at vague wording, but clear enough to the knowing eye.

 

What was worse as she went through the surviving tomes and records was the realization that there was no precedent to guide her. In all her years, each situation she encountered held only one viable response. The path was clear, the justice swift, the answer doubtless. Now she was alone, unable to ask her justicar brethren for guidance.

 

The incoming message alert beeped on her omni-tool, and she opened up the communicator expecting to see Lidanya again. Instead it was a message from Falere.

 

_Mother, I hope you are well_ , it began, and Samara felt a flutter of pride in her chest. A surge of... Maternal instincts.

 

They had come and gone at times ever since she killed Mirala, originating from that particular moment as she stood in the Omega apartment gathering herself together as Shepard picked shattered glass out of her arm. The pieces dropped into the sink one at time, followed by hisses and low curses, as Samara's eyes wandered between the broken window and her dead daughter. She thought of the day Mirala was born – the tears, the sweat, the pain and screams. Then the engulfing joy as the child rested on her chest, tiny and fragile, eyes closed and with fingers curled tightly together.

 

It was there she thought of the day Morinth was born, though there were a thousand names between Mirala and Morinth, yet her oldest circled back to the first one she took on when she ran. It was as if she knew, or maybe she was just careless. As much as Samara tried, she never understood Morinth, but nonetheless she ached as only a mother could as she choked the last life out of her firstborn.

 

She never forgot what she was, no matter how hard the demands to let go and erase any connections pushed down on those threads.

 

Falere's message evoked that same feeling, but in a far more hopeful way. That there was yet understanding to be found between them.

 

_Nothing happens on Lesuss, at least nothing I can do anything about. The settlers leave gifts outside the gates and then run away, terrified of me. I wish it was different – the loneliness and solitude is harder now that even you are gone – but I know why. Maybe time will change this, maybe it will not._

 

_The days pass nonetheless, in silence._

 

_Do not let the ruins of Thessia sadden you. Time will change that too._

 

_Take care, F_.

 

She closed the interface without responding. What could she say? That she was struggling to make a choice that was righteous and just when the very basis of what she had been, what role she had taken on, was a... 

 

It was all too much, and she stretched her sore limbs as she stood up and marched out of the small room.

 

For the five days Samara had been there, she spoke little beyond quick pleasantries to Miranda when they crossed paths. Liara kept commuting back and forth across Thessia in her shuttle, leaving early and returning late. The ship was quiet still, a light snoring coming from one of the rooms as Samara moved silently past the thin doors.

 

In the small observation room she took a seat on the floor but there was little peace to be forced upon her chaotic mind. Outside, the city of Armali was dark, only a few scattered lights shining from windows here and there. The traffic was non-existent despite the late hour, one during which the skies lit up with cars and public shuttles in her youth. Despite how intact the city appeared to be, it was still largely hollow, empty of the life which once throbbed throughout.

 

Armali, the city of her childhood, the home she left at an exceptionally early age, drifting out on wild adventures that made her old friends blush when they met up in civilized territories. The skyscraper where she once practiced biotic jumps from on a drunken dare still stood, tall and massive in the distance though with dented outlines against the starry night sky.

 

In her wilder mother days, she yearned to do it again, to feel the thrill and rush she missed so with three daughters to care for. They were in and of themselves an adventure of course, curious and...

 

Her mind wandered back to the day in the doctor's office when everything unravelled, of the life once promised to her and hers, taken away. Mirala, all emotions and heat, who ran as soon as she could, slipping away. Rila, who spent her last free days severing old friendships and stoically packing her life away. Falere, sweet and young, who could not stop her tears or nervousness. Her hands shook when she ate, but she refused to talk, whimpering in her sleep.

 

They all knew it, though it was a matter none of them found the strength to talk about then.

 

Most painful were the memories of the final nights, when the house was empty of their daughters and two old, broken hearts remained. The bondmate, whose crying eventually became apathy, became anger, became an empty apartment as even she left Samara when the choice of redemption was made.

 

In the polished curves of Armali's structures the first trembling rays of light were reflected, another morning taking form.

 

Loss used to be how she defined herself once, and in a way it still did. Losing the blessed life of a family could never be remembered as pleasant, but the acute sting of the memories faded over the centuries. Even the torture of ending her own daughter's life, the warm blood spattering across her skin, was transforming into a duller kind of ache.

 

That which was lost remained so, but... The future, even if it was just a hundred years, or a day, offered its own set of possibilities.

 

Daybreak came, and she opted to return to her room, knowing the light would blind her. In the small windowless cabin she ordered the documents neatly on the low table and rolled up the bedsheets to one end of the bed. All the while, her eye was drawn to the black box that rested in the corner, containing Shepard's dog tags.

 

She was too nostalgic to resist despite her best efforts. Slipping off her gloves she picked up the chain, running it between her fingers.

 

Shepard never wore them while working for Cerberus, but Samara saw them on a stand in the captain's cabin when she visited before the Omega-4 relay. She asked about them, wondering. It was the only question she asked, though it was not the only thing she wanted to know about the Commander.

 

Shepard piqued too much curiosity in Samara, but it was Shepard who set the rule. “No words. No talking. Just... Come sit with me.”

 

It was two hours of silence as they waited for the oncoming storm. Just the two of them, the stars above and their shared silence in the cool recycled air. They sat on the couch, Samara keeping a distance at first but without knowing who moved, they were arm to arm. It was subtle and slow as their fingers lined up and then intertwined, Shepard's naked hand against Samara's gloved one.

 

Shepard leaned her head against Samara's shoulder, sighing softly. The pressure increased before Samara realized Shepard had dozed off, her warm breath fluttering against Samara's chest. In a moment of weakness, she bowed her head and let it rest on top of Shepard's, the strange texture of hair tickling her cheek.

 

For a brief moment, Samara could smell it again: the hair and the skin, the sweat and musk, the fear and hopes. The first show of intimacy she allowed herself for ages, and it was to merely draw in deep of Shepard's scent, imprinting them in her olfactory glands. The scent itself still made her feel as she did then: dangerously close and yet light-years away.

 

She thumbed the dog tags themselves and was startled when Shepard's husky voice appeared. “ _For Samara, on the day I die._ ”

 

A message, recorded when the weight of a war effort seemingly doomed to buckle under the losses of attrition was on the forefront of her mind. She knew the way Shepard's voice changed when troubled, how there were small pauses as she breathed, yet it did not tremble or stutter, charging on ahead with the intention to convey. “ _It doesn't feel fair, or right, that we deny ourselves what little happiness we could have attained, but it's the choices we make and sacrifices we live with_ .” 

 

Choices and sacrifices, two things intricately interwoven and what the two of them knew all too well. What defined not only them as individuals, but the paths stretching back into the past and ahead into the future. Perhaps...

 

Perhaps there were choices yet to be made which would change their projected trajectories.

 

“ _It's the regrets we carry to our graves. It's the love lost and it's the knowledge of what could have been.”_

 

What could have a been. Samara smiled sadly; even if she did turn Shepard down, there was happiness just in the memories, treasures that would die with her soon enough.

 

“ _In my dreams, there's an ocean. By the ocean, there's us. Simple and imperfect, like us. And never to be.”_

 

The recording ended, and Samara put her gloves back on, brushing herself off as she rose from the floor. Her movements were determined, a pull in her chest guiding her as she wrapped the dog tags around her wrist and tucked them under the sleeve, feeling the metal as she walked to the cargo bay. She knew what to do, the knowledge clear and perfect in her mind.

 

Liara was just readying the skycar as Samara entered, greeting the justicar. “Good morning, Samara. What can I do for you?”

 

“It is time I traveled to Serrice,” Samara said without preamble, hands clasped behind her back.

 

Liara nodded thoughtfully, opening the door on the passenger side. “I was just on my way there.”

 

Their journey was quiet but for a brief exchange as they passed over the first signs of Serrice's urban sprawl, the once great mansions by the forests crumbling shells below them.

 

“The information I offered you,” Liara said, “has it changed your mind?”

 

“It has... Altered my perception of a great many things,” Samara said. “But in the end, no. The choice was made before this, yet it has strengthened my belief that it is the right one.” She turned her head away and smiled to herself, feeling the flat pieces of metal against the tender skin of her wrist.

 

The comfort of determination eased her path, lifting the doubts as she strode across the plaza, her feet leaving growing circles in the shallow water pool.

 

In the inner chamber of the Assembly, the matriarchs looked unnerved when she and Liara entered together, and it struck Samara how much was at stake for the asari republics. Not only the reputation solidified throughout Citadel history, but stretching further back than that, to the birth of their civilization.

 

She was not interested in politics in any form, and perhaps that was why the choice came so easily to her once pushed into action. If the government was found to be... Wrongful, she did not wish to protect them. 

 

Samara eyed all the matriarchs in turn as the words came together, slowly becoming able to give voice to her decision. She knew some from another, happier time in her life. Some of them had held Mirala in their arms, others had been at her bonding ceremony. Once, they were equals.

 

“What is your decision, justicar Samara?” Lidanya asked, and the chamber fell silent.

 

“A new era has begun, and with that come inevitable changes,” Samara said, weighing each word as she uttered them. “Perhaps the justicars should become a thing of the past, but that is for others to judge. I will remain one until my dying breath, following the Code. As flawed and troublesome as it is, it will live on. The Order, however, dies on this day.”

 

“You can't!” Irissa said in exasperation, but Lidanya shot her a cold glance that stopped any further comment.

 

“We will respect your choice,” Lidanya said decisively, giving Samara a small, sorrowful smile. “Go in peace, justicar.” Then she rose from her seat and strode across the room, clasping Samara's hand in hers. “And, from an old friend to another... Be careful.” She squeezed her hand without Samara returning the gesture.

 

“May the Goddess protect you from righteous wrath,” Samara said, bowing her head as she turned and left.

 

Outside, she stopped on the banks of the vast lakes of Serrice that were being slowly refilled with fresh water, small waves clucking against the sandy shores. Her shoes sunk into the soft dunes, the gentle breeze against her skin warm and pleasant. She loosened the chain from her wrist and let the tags run between her fingers, the message on them activated in the process.

 

Shepard's voice speaking her name. Calling it, across time, across space. “ _Samara_.”

 

The claws of freedom sank into her being once again, the bittersweet wounds re-opened.


	10. Chapter 10

 

“Call request coming through from the Orizaba,” Cortez said as they entered the system via the mass relay.

 

“I see,” Shepard muttered as she eyed the flashing console. The outer layer of her combat suit was still cold from the Noverian snow, and her limbs ached from the rigorous testing course she'd been put through to assess her combat abilities.

 

The dreadnought lay in orbit over Eirene in the Arcturus Stream cluster, discharging the drive core build-up into the atmosphere. Her hull was impeccably repaired, the ship the pride and joy of not only the Fifth Fleet and Admiral Hackett, but the Alliance as a whole. It was also one of the few dreadnoughts perfectly serviceable post-war, and where Shepard was assigned, a posting she was unsure if she wanted to keep temporary or permanent.

 

Cortez took them through the system via the remains of Arcturus station, lingering just in visual range for them to see the pieces of it still floating in the vacuum of space even as salvage teams were at work to recover bodies for a dignified funeral on Benning. They said nothing to each other, observing in quiet contemplation. 

 

It was one thing to pass through a hundred clusters in the middle of a raging war, and quite another to watch the shattered pieces being put back together... Or put away.

 

Shepard flexed her hands in the gloves, feeling the rising tingle of biotics. She was not yet able to attune them to what her body had become: the prosthetics in her hand were something she struggled to compensate for and overall, her body felt like ill-fitting armor forcibly strapped on. Too... Strange. Too new. Sometimes merely touching her own skin caused her to shudder in disgust, a reaction she failed to pinpoint where it stemmed from.

 

“Hackett's waiting,” she said, and Cortez nodded as the thrusters kicked up, taking them back on track to the Orizaba.

 

She keyed the pending transmission through. “How did it go?” Hackett asked bluntly.

 

“Poorly,” Shepard responded, teeth gritted.

 

“You're still fresh from the operating table. I'll look over the report once it goes through, but until then, there is a situation I need your help with here. Meet you in the shuttle bay.”

 

She straightened up in the co-pilot seat. “Understood.” She saluted before the screen closed.

 

“Not much of a holiday you got,” Cortez remarked.

 

She couldn't argue with that, but it was she who felt compelled to return, lacking any reason not to. Lacking a solid plan what else to do with her time, and she was not one to be aimless.

 

It wasn't exactly active duty, but she wasn't one to complain. _Diplomatic consultant_ had a nice ring to it, especially as Hackett was making a show of getting away from Earth to avoid getting dragged into the political plays of power. The Orizaba's victory cruise was as much an attempt to establish firm diplomatic relationships in the oncoming times as it was scouting for unstable elements – as it was two military commanders shirking politics.

 

Besides, there was much to fix still.

 

There were scattered reports of colonies besieged by pirates and mercenaries exploiting the post-war exhaustion, not to mention the attempts by batarian loyalists to re-establish the Hegemony... All of it was tiring to think of, but Shepard felt it a better place to be than simply waiting around on Earth. Her place was drifting among the stars, doing something and being active, rather than wilting away like the endless stream of flowers that piled up in her hospital room.

 

Her hands still couldn't hold a gun like she used to, and her biotics were unstable, but at least the vastness of space was her home again. If nothing else, there was a comfort in knowing that her military career could continue onwards.

 

When they landed in the shuttle bay, Hackett was already there as Shepard disembarked, and her hand snapped up in a salute. As it did, she felt an ice-cold crack of energy pulse through her wrist, a glow passing briefly by that the admiral merely raised an eyebrow at but did not comment on.

 

“At ease, soldier,” Hackett said, motioning for her to come closer. “Good you returned when you did. This is a situation that only you can handle.” 

 

“What's wrong?”

 

“That asari warrior, Samara? She's here. She's asked for you.”

 

Shepard immediately tensed up, putting her hands behind her back as she curled them into tight fists, trying to hide the sparks of wild biotic energy. “Did she state what for?”

 

“So far she has claimed that her intention is not to harm. It's all she will say on the matter. Or anything, in fact.” Hackett began walking towards the other side of the massive hangar, Shepard keeping up. “Diplomatic protocol for justicars states to allow them free passage through civilian territories, but...”

 

“She's not here for passage.”

 

“No. Frankly, I'm concerned this might be interpreted as an incident or slight towards the asari.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Greeting such an esteemed figure with loaded guns never ranks high on good relations, and we only did so because she is flagged as a high-risk threat against...” Hackett glanced at her meaningfully, and she nodded, feeling no need to hear the end of the sentence.

 

The access door on the far side opened up to a corridor filled with guards and heavy security. Keying and scanning them through the checks only took a minute, but it was enough idle time for Shepard's thoughts to begin twisting and turning wildly. She had begun putting the thought out of her mind, piece by piece, detaching herself from the mere idea of the justicar. To have her re-appear was a dizzying prospect, and one she did not know what to make of.

 

There was the oath broken in a feverish daze and the Code compelling Samara into action; had she returned to pursue it? Yet claiming she meant no harm – a justicar's word was absolute, never carrying deceit or deception... So why had she come? No matter how she tried, she could not predict in the slightest what was waiting. 

 

With a great effort, she let go, and the pent-up mass effect field vanished in a bright, brilliant spark of light as well.

 

Another door opened and there she was: the constant mystery haunting Shepard. Samara was seated on the floor with legs crossed, eyes open and glowing white as she meditated. In each of the room's corner stood a marine with rifle in hand, their eyes on her hands. There was no typical biotic sphere between Samara's fingertips, but a small flicker of energy passed between them as Shepard's boots hit against the floor and the marines stood to attention.

 

“Shepard,” Samara said, closing her eyes and opening them again, returned to their natural icy blue.

 

“Why have you come?” Shepard asked in response, circling around her sitting form. The marines raised their guns in nervous anticipation, but she ignored them, eyes on Samara. She looked a little different, yet still the same: the sharpness of the jaw, the straightness of her posture, the cold eyes. All of it just as captivating and beautiful as memory held it.

 

Samara did not answer the question until Shepard came full circle and stood in front of her again. “I came for you,” she said, smiling gently up at Shepard. “There is a matter I desire to speak of. Is there somewhere we could talk, just the two of us?”

 

“Do you truly believe she won't try to kill you?” Hackett interjected.

 

“She's a justicar,” Shepard said, studying Samara's face as she looked for something: a lie, a nervous twitch, but it was placid as always. “And even if she wasn't, she's honest. _I_ trust her.”

 

Shepard chewed on the inside of her cheek, eyes flicking up to meet with Hackett's. It was his ship, after all, and with only three day cycles onboard she wasn't sure of the extent of power he was willing to grant her – she herself understood the attitude that came with being in command, of putting the safety of the crew above all in each judgement made. It took her by surprise when he did nod, a slight twitch to his lips as he ordered the marines to stand down.

 

She mouthed a thank you at him.

 

Samara rose smoothly from the floor, her movements fluid as she came up to eye-level with Shepard. The Commander was about to say something, but then just began walking towards the elevators, Samara following closely.

 

Stepping into the elevators, Shepard paused by the panel, tapping her thumb against the side of it as she thought over where to go. 

 

“I'm sorry for the reception,” she said, not looking back over her shoulder. “It's just that you're flagged in the system. I'll get it fixed, and you will be allowed to pass through human territories without issue from now on, so–“ She ran out of air and breathed in through her nose, exhaling via her mouth, and decided upon a destination. 

 

The elevator began its slow climb, and she slumped back against the wall, peeling the mnemonic visor off her head.

 

They were quiet, on opposite sides of the small enclosed space, the tip of their shoes inches from touching. Her eyes strayed upward but stopped at Samara's chin, not daring to meet her gaze without the shield of her visor. “Hey,” Shepard said, at a loss for words.

 

“You look better than when I saw you last,” Samara remarked softly. 

 

“Do I? Thank you, I guess. I was pretty out of it that time.” Shepard scratched at her temple, tongue darting out to wet her lips.

 

“You do not feel it.” The statement was so precise it almost hurt.

 

“Too observant.” Shepard glanced at the display. Fifteen floors to go. “I've felt worse, but I've been far better than this.”

 

“These times are not as I expected,” Samara admitted.

 

“I didn't expect to live.”

 

“Me neither.”

 

They fell quiet, eyes meeting as they measured the other. Shepard had not expected that from Samara, despite the words they exchanged on the Citadel, despite the farewells before the final push. Or perhaps that was a blatant lie – hope substituting that spoken with what she wanted to hear. The necessity in hope to keep her in motion, but it was a well beginning to run dry.

 

“Everything's pretty much the same,” Shepard said, giving voice to a disappointment she had never spoken of before. She often chided herself when those thoughts bubbled up, pushing down that idealistic naivete, but something about being in the presence of Samara undid it all. The justicar always had that effect upon her, being the one person she trusted enough to see something behind the Commander and legend. “I thought... I thought too much and too little about what these times would be like, it seems, but this wasn't anywhere near what I expected.”

 

She expected Samara to point out the obvious – that it was to be expected, that it was in the nature of the galaxy to return to the status quo, that the galaxy was a constant wrong in need of righting – but she said nothing.

 

“Do you think I'm small-minded?” Shepard asked outright, genuinely wondering. Eight floors left.

 

“You are a cataclysmic force able to move planets,” Samara said. “But you are also just a person, one afflicted with needs and desires, traumas and joys...” To Shepard's surprise, she felt Samara's hands grasp at hers, fingertips pressing against her palm.

 

Shepard felt her defenses crumbling and the small sparks of biotic energy began jumping from her body to Samara's, both of them breathing in sharply as they crackled like lightning. In a fit of exasperation, she uttered the only question she truly wanted to ask in that moment. “Why have you come?”

 

“It is as I said. For you,” Samara continued, calm unruffled despite the intense energy pulsing between them, beating along to Shepard's heart. “It has been two years tomorrow. I have thought of that day all too often, of what I denied us. A connection, the chance of happiness, the possibility of...” Samara put a hand on Shepard's cheek, turning her head up with a gentle nudge. When their eyes met Samara closed her mouth, the word she was about to utter abruptly silenced.

 

Three floors.

 

They simply remained there, neither moving nor looking away. Shepard felt the tension of energy beginning to ache, barely able to breathe as the biotics became bright arcs between them. Samara leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss to Shepard's lips. They just barely touched but Shepard became still, eyes closed as she sighed against Samara's mouth lingering by hers. The scent, the warmth, it was far more intense than she remembered it. Giving in, she responded back, cupping Samara's face and pulling her close as she kissed with a desperate need. Slowly the wild, untamed energy dissapitated as their lips moved and parted, the tongues touching cautiously.

 

When the last of the biotics left, Shepard broke away for a breath and glanced at the floor display. It was more instinct than thought that drove her as she activated the omni-tool with a twist of her wrist, slamming it against the panel. The circuits overloaded and the elevator came to a halt.

 

Deactivating the glowing interface, she turned back to Samara, gingerly placing the hand at the curve of the asari's waist. “Are you sure?” she asked, voice a mere whisper. “What about your Code, what about being a justicar?”

 

“You light many fires in your wake, and they are difficult to put out.”

 

“I'm not sure I follow.”

 

“The Order is gone, and I am not the person to keep it alive. What remains stays, but I have to chart and walk the new path I create for myself.”

 

Shepard let one finger touch the collar at Samara's throat, delicately tracing the ornate patterns running like chains all around. “Samara. The last justicar.”

 

“A sad title to wear.”

 

“It fits you though.” 

 

“Now that I make my own future... I would like to align it with yours, if you would have me.”

 

Shepard smiled, a tentative twitch in her lips. “I think it will be a while before they fix the elevator. Maybe we could talk for a bit.” She let go of Samara's hand as she slumped against the wall and slid down onto the floor, stretching her legs all the way out with a content grunt.

 

“I cannot linger here for long,” Samara said, voice tinged with regret as she sat down next to Shepard. “I promised to return to Falere, and it is my intention to do so soon. The delays have been numerous enough already, but this was an important one.”

 

“Flatterer.” She removed her gloves, pulling them off one finger at a time. “First things first. If I did something going against the Code in the future, should I be worried?”

 

“The Code is just, but it calls for many deaths. I tire of taking lives out of a galaxy marred by so much destruction. Remind an old warrior, what was it you fought for?”

 

“Everyone's right to make mistakes. To be selfish, arrogant, petty as much as their chance to love, to create, to try.”

 

Samara leaned her head back against the cool wall, gazing at Shepard's naked hands. “The Code demanded your life be taken, as it wanted Falere's. It demanded eradication of a world that vastly outgrew its original scope. In ancient times, no justicar even dreamed of the possibility to see the stars from anywhere else than Thessia's solid ground. The Code has not changed one line since those days.”

 

“Would you kill me?” Shepard pushed the question again.

 

Samara closed her eyes. “Put simply, no.”

 

They plunged once again into a silence, but it was a relaxed one, similar to the numerous ones shared onboard the Normandy during the mission weaving them through the galaxy towards the Omega-4 relay. _Two years_. Shepard was torn between how dream-like it all felt, and how real it did feel.

 

For a few minutes Shepard simply basked in it, head swelling with thoughts of a future they could share together. The mere concept seemed unreal, a beaming smile constantly on the verge of taking over her entire face. It unfurled like a warmth through her entire being, and she felt at ease for the first time in... Possibly a year.

 

“I came to return this.” Samara broke the silence as she undid something around her wrist, handing it over to Shepard. The dog tags dangled from her hand, and the Commander laughed as she accepted them.

 

“So that's where they went. I thought I lost them.” Then the smile faded as she hung them alongside the newly minted pair around her neck. “Did you...”

 

“Yes.” Samara scooted closer, taking a hold of Shepard's hand. “The ocean you spoke of, does it exist or is it a figment of dreams?”

 

“Haven't found the perfect shore yet.”

 

She intertwined their fingers. “We could search for it together.”

 

Shepard leaned her head against Samara's, feeling those two years melt away in her presence. When she closed her eyes she could smell the orchids of the observatory on the Normandy, the soft engine hum barely audible under their combined breathing. Words floated up and weighed on her tongue, but none were spoken. It was more than enough to simply be in that moment, to let that unspeakable bond root itself down again.

 

All good things end. The elevator jolted into action again, and Shepard sighed as she rose to her feet before offering Samara a helping hand. As she pulled the asari up, she paused a second before pushing that slight hesitation away and pressing their lips together.

 

“I must be on my way,” Samara said, stroking Shepard's cheek. The doors opened behind them, light pouring in. “It is greedy to wish for more time in this present, seeing as we have much of it to look forward to... But I do.”

 

Shepard disentangled herself from their loose embrace and backed out of the elevator, pushing the button to return Samara to the shuttle hangar.

 

“See you soon, Samara.”

 

“We will, Shepard.”

 

The doors were just about to close when she stopped them with her hand. “Call me Zoë. Please.” Through the small opening she saw Samara smile.

 

“Soon, Zoë.”

 

Letting go and turning around, she walked into the Orizaba's green garden, an entire deck with artificial sunlight and grassy floors. Plants and small trees were arranged almost too neatly for Shepard's tastes, but she enjoyed the place even if the scents were muted and the lights a shade too bright at times. There were no others present as she walked to her favorite spot under a Thessian tree, unzipping the top of the light combat suit and peeling her arms free.

 

Falling back on the patch of soft grass, she spread her limbs out and blinked up at the light filtering through the dense foliage above. She ran her fingers along the torso, feeling the ribcage shifting with each lungful of filtered air, thumbing the bruises and scars as the hands passed over them.

 

Closing her eyes, Zoë buried her fingers in the shallow dirt, digging them down as her mind returned to the only thought she was currently capable of.

 

 _Inhale._ She was ready to begin again with the person whose taste still lingered on her lips. _Exhale_. To begin anew.


	11. Chapter 11

The journey had been delayed twice before Samara finally arrived at Illium. It was late in the night, the lights of Nos Astra glittering below in uneven grid patterns. Large black gashes ran through the city vista, darkened parts that made the once flawless network appear as if slashed to pieces. There was nothing jarring in seeing scarred worlds anymore, at least not to Samara: all it did was leave a twinge of the bittersweet in her heart. Many things in the galaxy did that to her though.

 

The humid Illium heat was inescapable even in the arrival terminal, other passengers filing out ahead of her fanning themselves with datapads and magazines. She rolled her head from side to side, touching the naked neck and tracing out the little indentations from where the collar used to press against her skin, binding her to the Order and Code. She wore it little now, even though she felt naked and vulnerable without it, her chain and marker.

 

Shepard – _Zoë_ , Samara corrected herself – was waiting, leaning against a wall opposite the arrival gate. She flashed her a weak, tired smile and raised one hand, waving her fingers stiffly. She was still unused to the name, having never uttered it while on the mission towards the Omega-4 relay. It felt strange in her mouth, a short whisper, soft sometimes and harsh others, and yet it never failed to make the name bearer fall silent as Samara uttered it during their calls.

 

Coincidence and fortune had not favored them, four months having passed from the last time they saw each other in a dark elevator aboard the Orizaba. There were calls, short as they were with comm buoys still being unreliable, and messages sent one day and received two days later. Even this meeting in Nos Astra would only last for a few precious hours, both with commitments elsewhere pulling them apart.

 

Yet the need to meet in the flesh trumped the miniscule allotment of time.

 

Zoë pressed her hand warmly and stood on her tip-toes to brush a soft, almost shy kiss to Samara's cheek. Samara wished to take her by the chin and tilt it up, to kiss her on the mouth until she felt a sigh pass from between those dark lips; but the time and place was not there yet. 

 

“I have missed you,” Zoë said as she stepped away from the wall.

 

“And I you,” Samara added, watching the human's back. It was as familiar a view as it was not, armor and shotgun missing – but she moved with less stiffness, the hair was longer and caught on the collar of the grey blazer she wore.

 

“Thankfully Spectre credentials still work in asari space,” Zoë commented as the customs agent cleared Samara through with little hassle.

 

“Why would they not?” Samara inquired.

 

Zoë grimaced. “If you don't know, you'll find out soon.”

 

Samara, despite her rusty ability to decipher social cues, at least knew the ones Zoë conveyed and chose to drop the subject.

 

Exiting the spaceport, the warm humidity of Nos Astra hit against them full-force: the night did little to lessen the dense heat that built up and dissipated slowly. Zoë weaved through the upper street levels, sometimes holding up a hand to shield her face when a group of people passed by. It helped little: someone still managed to recognize the hero and call out her name, desiring her attention, to plead for help or express gratitude.

 

With a few terse phrases, she cut through most of the conversations and excused herself, but it still took them triple the time to make it to the hotel lobby. By then, there was a streak of sweat staining the fabric between her shoulder blades, and even Samara felt the warmth itching at the back of her neck. Taking the corridor past the front desk, they came to the end of the hall with two guards posted on either side of an unnumbered door.

 

“I'm high-profile enough to require constant protection,” Shepard commented off-handedly to Samara, nodding to the asaris as they let them through. “Though I think it's just asari high command trying to save face after that...” She let it drop, seeing one commando twist her head away in shame.

 

Once inside and with door closed, Zoë let out a loud groan and kicked off her shoes, sending them flying across the floor with one landing under the bed. Bare feet threading the wooden floor, she spread out her toes as she balanced on the balls of her feet in front of the desk. She poured them each a glass of wine, handing one over to Samara still standing in the middle of the room before she herself sat down on the edge of the bed.

 

Zoë looked a strange blend of excitement and exhaustion as she sipped on the clear liquid. Samara gave the drink a quick sniff – hints of fruits and flowers she vaguely recognized – as she remained on her feet, shifting slightly as she took in the room. Spacious, airy, but steeped in silence and with a cool chill from the air conditioning that caused those peculiar little bumps on Zoë's skin.

 

Zoë emptied the glass in one quick sweep and began fumbling with the buttons of her blazer, shedding it in one shrug of her shoulders. Underneath she wore a simple white tank-top, the dog tags hitting against her chest where rosy pink scars criss-crossed the skin, bumpy and twisted. Her fingers moved restlessly, tugging at the chain around her neck in one second to touching another part of her body the next.

 

“What weighs upon your mind?” Samara asked.

 

“How could you tell?”

 

“You are an open book,” she said, putting the glass down on the desk before taking a seat next to Zoë. “But one opened onto a translated page from a different era: a poem I understand pieces of, the annotations to explain you missing.” 

 

“You're being too poetic about me.” Zoë leaned forward, elbows on legs as she rolled her head twice before letting it hang, the black hair falling forward like a solid curtain. “I wish I had more to say,” she murmured, sighing. “I'm doing work for the Alliance I can't talk about. There's so much I can't tell you, and so much of it I don't want to burden you with.”

 

Samara scooted closer. “Spoken words say much but tell little. It is a good time just to be in the presence of you.”

 

“Is that truly enough? Am I enough? I just...”

 

Samara stopped her, using her finger to catch the loose hair and tuck it behind Zoë's ear. She lingered by the soft earlobe, fascinated with that particular part of her anatomy. While never admitting it to herself previously, she had wondered how they felt, if they were soft all over as the lobe suggested or hard as the upper curve. Her finger slid along it, feeling and exploring as Zoë sighed.

 

“I am tired and my entire body hurts,” Zoë murmured, moving with the touch. “But you make everything better.”

 

She leaned close and pressed a kiss to the high cheekbone, moving the lips lower along her face as Zoë tilted her head. Moving onto the bed, she placed herself behind Zoë, legs alongside hers, as she touched the knotted muscles of the back.

 

Her body felt hard as steel under Samara's hands, all metal and tension as she moved over the shoulders. Sweat began pearling on Zoë's neck even though she was being gentle. “Let it out,” Samara urged, and after a brief hesitation Zoë let out a pained grunt that turned into a wail when Samara slid her fingers down the spine. The noises coming from her throat were at times otherworldly, steeped in a pain and ache so deep it forced Samara to close her eyes and bite the inside of her cheek. It hurt to listen to, but she kept moving her hands, loosening one hard muscle at a time and feeling the slow relaxation spreading through Zoë.

 

She moved the hands along the soft tissue on either side of the spine, then circled around to the front. Zoë's head rolled back, her cheek sticky against Samara's with humidity and sweat yet smelling oddly salty.

 

“I...” Her voice broke and she cleared her throat, trying again. “I don't know what to say.”

 

“If you are at a loss for words, there are other forms of togetherness,” Samara suggested, voice a low whisper.

 

Zoë bit down on her lower lip as Samara put a hand at the small of her back, arching backwards as that hand slid up vertebrae by vertebrae. “Yes, please,” she pleaded, letting out a small yelp as Samara smoothly changed their positions and pushed her down onto the bed, straddling her hips.

 

Samara gazed down at Zoë, fascinated with the body spread out before her. The tank top was pushed up enough to reveal the underside of one breast, one of her hands moving up from the waistband to cup at it as she leaned forward. Their lips met, soft and tentative, interrupted by each gasp that Zoë exhaled.

 

As she moved her hands across the scarred body she alternated her pace, memorizing each bump and dent on the surface, mapping out where she elicited the gasps of pain and the ones of shuddering tense pleasure. She took her time, merely nudging the fabric out of the way without removing it until there was a frustrated grunt as Zoë shot up, one arm around Samara's waist to keep her from toppling backwards.

 

Zoë began working on the clothes Samara wore, pushing them down from her shoulders. Samara smiled into their kiss and straightened up, undoing the last fastenings keeping the upper part of her suit on. With a simple shrug it slid off and Zoë became still, holding on to her hips as she merely looked. Her mouth came closer, the lips pressing a kiss to Samara's collarbone.

 

The mere touch undid something rooted deep in Samara, hundreds of years of loneliness melting away as Zoë merely kissed a path down her front. No one had touched her in such a way for so long, and she drew in a sharp breath as it bordered on being too much. Her hand clutched at the dark hair, tugging the head away as she wished to take control of the situation again.

 

She pulled at the top Zoë still wore and it was quickly shed, Zoë dropping back on the mattress in a pained groan and back arching up. It quickly transformed into a different kind of writhing as Samara dipped her head down and trailed kisses from the navel upwards, eyes constantly on Zoë's face. Each expression was noted, and the higher she got the deeper Zoë bit into her lower lip, her hands carefully placed at the back of Samara's head. Her fingers pressed against the delicate folds at the back of her neck and Samara moaned against her breast.

 

Zoë quickly removed her hands, looking alarmed. “Did I hurt you?”

 

“Not at all,” Samara said, stroking her cheek as she planted a few kisses along Zoë's jawline, feeling the thundering heartbeat slow down in the ribcage below her. When it was calm enough, she spoke again, voice heavy with desire. “I wish to give you all I have and all I am. If you would have me.”

 

“Yes. Always.” She kissed Samara hard and deep. “ _Always_.”

 

“Focus.” Samara had not done it in a long time, but it was an unforgettable process. It started as a conscious activation of her biotics, a gentle glow building up around her hands before the field enveloped them both. Her eyes closed and she uttered the traditional words, eyes opening again as Zoë moaned beneath her.

 

“I wish for you to know,” Samara said, unsure if she was uttering it physically or only mentally, but it did not matter as she took Zoë into her own consciousness, showing her a long lifetime of memories. A hundred joys, the thousands of sorrows carefully pushed away for the moment being.

 

Their nervous systems attuned, Samara felt each movement echoing into Zoë, each touch amplified as she began to remove their remaining clothing. She went slow, taking care to not upset the scars and sore points that left Zoë gasping for air each time she passed over them. They were causing her equal amounts of pain and pleasure, and Samara dipped down to trail kisses along the scarred chest as she began working the buttons of the tight pants.

 

Both fully naked, she marveled at all she felt, all the pain and pleasure from Zoë, the anticipation as Samara spread her thighs and moved her mouth from the knee upwards, leaving wet marks she breathed cool air on. Zoë responded so easily to each stimulation, arching off the bed the closer Samara got. When her lips moved against the labia and parted them, they both moaned. Zoë's hands returned to their position at the back of Samara's neck, touching the folds there without any hesitation.

 

They moved slow, each little brush of skin against skin amplified. Zoë's voice grew hoarse but yet she kept moaning, chanting only one name over and over. _Samara, Samara._ Her tongue and fingers moved in a tender unison, drawing Zoë closer and closer to the breaking point.  It blurred into a daze, nerve-endings alight with white-hot pleasure, sensations she had not experienced for centuries shuddering through Samara's body. She felt her fingers trembling and toes curling, following closely on Zoë's own pleasure.

 

When she pushed Zoë over the edge they both came, all tensions giving way to the pure bliss. For a glorious moment it was just them, everything else disappearing – no pain, no history, no future, just a perfectly isolated moment where it was only the two of them soaring free.

 

Returning to the present, they were tangled in sheets and each other, clothes still hanging around their ankles. She shed the last of it with a push of her feet before she shuddered, feeling the prickle of skin as the cool air hit against the trails of perspiration on her skin.

 

Samara maintained the melding connection as she crawled up the bed to press a kiss to Zoë's lips. Even though her arms were shaking and she felt the weakness of bliss hampering her intentions, she wished to take the chance at exploring the memories in the other. She grazed against Zoë's consciousness who gasped and clutched at the sheets, a dozen glimpses flashing by: _the breath Shepard exhaled when they first met which alerted Samara to their presence, lonely nights as a small child looking at vids on damaged monitors with a star-less sky above._

 

Then Samara was met with nothing but a dense darkness, hard and harsh, opening up where she expected to find further insight into Zoë. Straining against it was futile: it did not budge, and when she tried to find a way around it the connection suddenly broke.

 

Samara winced at the abrupt end to the melding, a sharp sting of pain lingering at her temples.

 

“Are you alright?” Zoë asked in concern, her brow knitted together even as her heavy eyelids sagged deeper.

 

“I am fine,” Samara said, brushing off the question. “Just a mistake. It has been a while since I last melded.” She pulled Zoë down to rest on her chest, threading her fingers through the coarse, dark hair as the human's breath fluttered against her skin. Slowly, the rhythm of her breathing slowed down, grew even, and her body became heavy.

 

It was harder for Samara to find any such peace and comfort, the pounding in her head drumming on. She slid herself out from under Zoë and walked into the bathroom where she let the water run free, splashing her face and drinking deep of it. The pain abated, but the doubts remained. 

 

In the mirror, she watched water dripping down from her cheekbones and trail along her naked torso. It had been some time since she last viewed herself so candidly in the harsh light of a hotel mirror, but she was not much different. If she relaxed her shoulders and pushed out her stomach, she looked just like she remembered from the trip to Kahje when she was just beginning to show with Mirala.

 

_Let it go._

 

She leaned close to study her own reflection, but there was nothing amiss. Her lips were swollen from kisses and her cheeks flushed a darker blue, little else.

 

Returning to the bedroom, she found that Zoë was spread out across the bed in all her naked glory, the wild hair surrounding her head like a dark halo and partially covering her face. The lips parted for an instant when Samara nudged her foot as she moved past, letting out a protesting groan. She instead pulled on a robe and called down to order up a light meal. It arrived within minutes, the maiden delivering it trying to sneak a peek of the Commander before Samara closed the door.

 

She sat down by the window, balancing the plate in her lap as she ate the salad piece by piece and gazed out at Nos Astra.

 

Following the arc of traffic across the sky she found her eyes wandering to the place where she first met Shepard – where they first began. The glimpse of the meeting as seen through Shepard's eyes, with the fascination and hesitation, the first innocent touch of an attraction, added a new layer to the meeting, yet... 

 

Samara felt the ghostly sting of her headache passing by again, reminded of the strange melding. It seemed to not have affected Zoë if her heavy sleep was anything to go by, but there was a worrisome implication of it that Samara could not decipher.

 

Where she was meant to encounter another's memories, she found nothing but immense, dense darkness. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced, nor did she recall anyone else who had gone through something similar. A black void in an intact, living and sapient mind.

 

Turning the situation over and over, she struggled to make sense of it. She had felt Zoë in her own memories, actively opening up some and pushing others away, wishing to give her only joy. From what little she knew and a few off-handed comments passed on the Shadow Broker's ship, there was a certain strength to Shepard's mind that once intimidated Liara. Samara had then brushed it off as a maiden's inexperienced first tries, but perhaps there was some truth to it.

 

The more she thought about it, the less she understood it, yet... Death, having occurred nearly twice, and the burdens of a war almost having crushed Shepard, may be playing a part. It was not uncommon that asari commandos having gone through difficult combat engagements struggled with meldings, or that some severely scarred aliens became troublesome to meld with, but none of those stories had mentioned what she had experienced. Memories in turmoil, feelings running high as they were made vulnerable yet again, yes: but not... That.

 

She finished her meal and stretched out on the cushioned seat, forehead resting against the cool window. Sleep was not a thing she needed much of, nor would it come to her when she was beset by questions and concerns. She was struck by the fact that all throughout the war, she had not explicitly worried about Shepard. The Commander marched onwards, from battle to battle, and Samara never doubted her commitment to the final victory. All along, she believed in the pure strength and force of Shepard.

 

Now, watching her sleep naked in a bed, Samara began peeling away the last legendary misgivings she had of the human woman. She was mortal. She was scarred and haunted, and she was troubled by what the past had bestowed upon her. How many years did she have left in her body – a hundred? Such a brief gasp in the galaxy's time-span, such an impact made.

 

Samara turned her hands over: the spots on the back of them were the only clue to how old she was. Well into her matriarch years now, closing in on that final stretch of years were her life would begin to wither away. She pulled the sleeves of the robe down to obscure the signs. 

 

However much she thought of it, she could not make any sense of it. Time would pass and perhaps reveal a way... Or close it forever.

 

The first rays of sunlight lit up the tall glass-encased towers in the distance, and the morning alarm on Zoë's communicator went off on the floor. Samara went to turn it off and then kneeled on the bed, moving over the sleeping body. She brushed away the hair with gentle strokes until the face laid bare and she pressed a kiss to the soft cheek.

 

“It is time for you to depart,” Samara said, pressing another kiss to the other cheek as Zoë tried to cover her eyes.

 

“Not yet,” Zoë muttered, clumsily flinging one arm around Samara's shoulders and pulling her close. Samara let herself be dragged down onto the bed, Zoë nuzzling her from behind as she wavered between sleep and waking. 

 

Lacing their fingers together, Samara thought only of how much she was looking forward to another morning like it.

 


	12. Chapter 12

Another morning, another mission. Shepard rose with a weight square center in her back and kept rolling her shoulders back over and over as she washed her face and brushed the teeth, scrolling the datapad as she went through the routine briefing. The numbers were staggering, but every colony – human, asari, turian – still functional reported the same. 

 

A thousand or so husks to be put down, rounded up in hidden camps and kept tightly under wraps. Just another day's dirty work to be done.

 

It was Shepard herself who demanded to get assigned to the husk terminations when she first heard of them. The task called to her, through nights and days, one nagging at the edge of her consciousness. She felt a responsibility to see the last pieces of the war through, to tie up the remaining loose ends.

 

Hackett argued with her, mostly for the sake of posterity. He knew that once she set her mind to something it was hell convincing her otherwise, but he did her the favor of being a differing opinion like she did to him. In the comfort of their own private deck on the Orizaba they drank and argued, wearing only fatigues. Eventually the conversation left Alliance matters as it always did, and for a few hours they were no longer the admiral and commander. For a brief period of time, they slid back to who they were when they first met: him a rising star in the navy, and she a young scoundrel impressing him with stupid tricks.

 

Neither of them slept much, but in his cabin she usually drifted off when he got started talking in his soft reminiscent voice, and woke up covered in a blanket with Hackett already gone off to see to his daily duties.

 

The taste of alcohol took a while to remove from her mouth, and she felt stiff all throughout her body as she kept flexing her limbs in the elevator down. It seemed an adequate state of being for what she was about to do.

 

While waiting for Cortez to arrive, she went through the logs of the facility to ensure everything had been done correctly, or as correctly as it could be considering the vague terms stipulated by the makeshift military council in charge of the operation.

 

The process was simple on the surface and one she memorized quickly: the sorting that came first, assigning them into different groupings depending on far along the conversion they were. Some were still able to talk; some could not, but their eyes were intact, gazing directly at anyone they saw with a silent plea they were unable to convey. Their hands would reach out to the nearest person, an act some sorters deemed to land them on different ends of the spectrum.

 

The hotly debated spectrum originally ranged from sapient to non-sapient, but the accuracy of that grouping was far off. Even the ones completely lost seemed to possess a sort of awareness yet lacked so much else. Most of all, _will_. She followed the turns of the discussion regarding it, but said little. She had made enough decisions to last the galaxy a thousand years, she was willing to rescind a bit of control to another's judgement.

 

Anyone with a little detachment could kill the fully huskified and still sleep relatively fine at night. They weren't why she was taking on the job.

 

It was the ones in the borderland, half between a person and a monster, that got to people. They were half-way through the process, the nano-machines used by the Reapers having ceased the transformation from fully organic being to an abomination of synthetics and singed flesh. The drive was gone as well as the purpose, but their sentience was debatable.

 

Those were the ones that made people waver, that gave them nightmares. That reminded them of someone, just enough to make them want to walk away. It didn't matter what they were – faulty rejects, flawed creations discarded, or the unlucky who had been suffering through the transformation just as the war ended. There was still a bit left of who they used to be, even if it was just superficial.

 

The ones other struggled with, was the ones she got dealt. She came in her white armor, the spare set she rarely used, every possible identification of Commander Shepard scrubbed off, any visible trace leading to the Butcher of Torfan removed. Instead she became known as something else entirely. Another kind of butcher, sometimes of mercy and sometimes of other, harsher, words.

 

In the nondescript stealth shuttle leaving the Orizaba, she gazed at herself in the helmet's visor reflection. With the dark lightning and her hair pulled back, she appeared no different than the Shepard who led the attack on Torfan. Nine years later, and with enough darkness, she could just about be the same she was then.

 

She never regretted what she did on Torfan. Sometimes she woke up in the night, sweaty and shivering, ears ringing with the explosions of the narrow corridors deep down in the moon's base. Sometimes she thought she saw the ones she led to their death in a reflection. After her own death, it happened less and less. The two-year wide gap between the first Shepard and the second was difficult to bridge. Most of the time, she chose not to even attempt crossing it. 

 

Death was final in some aspects even if one came back to life, severing ties and bonds... Yet strengthening others. The ones that mattered.

 

Putting on the helmet, she listened to her own breathing, getting into the rhythm of inhaling through the nose and letting the air out via her mouth. Her pulse slowed as she stepped out from the shuttle and surveyed the camp. Outside the high fence she could hear a few protesters, but the personnel on the inside went about their business as if they heard nothing.

 

After a month or two on the job, all noises blended into the same indistinct din.

 

At the start of the elimination and clean-up project – which had a fancier and far more neutral title that she refused to use on principle: call it what it was and don't try to dress it up in gentler wording – she expected to only be deployed to human territories. They were not the only who struggled though, and with the governments working closely together in their efforts to begin anew, it became a profitable lease contract for the Alliance. A goodwill gesture to help remove a difficult problem, as Hackett put it when he briefed her, pointedly ignoring the eye-rolling she was doing.

 

“Bottom line,” she said, “I'm still being rented out with a good profit margin.”

 

“You know how it is,” Hackett said in that sharp tone that brokered no argument. She gave him no more that time.

 

At the landing pad a turian approached and saluted, and she returned the gesture before following him wordlessly. There was no need speak about it; as the saying around the camps went, _go through the motions and go home._ The pay was plentiful, the medical benefits many, and it gave restless soldiers something to do.

 

The difficulty lay in the fact that nearly all of them knew someone transformed by the Reapers – many had it even seen it first-hand. It could be the smallest thing that made them unable to continue on: a familiar gesture performed by the idle bodies, a screech from broken vocal cords. The suggestion was what undid them all sooner or later.

 

She knew she would hit that point too, but her blessing lay in the fact that she had been going up against it for far longer. The scents did not make her stomach churn anymore, and she had no qualms about crushing a husk's neck under the sole of her boot if they tried to cling to her body. No matter how untouched they looked, she knew one truth and held on to it as tightly as possible: if they were infected, there was no way to reverse it.

 

Well, that was another point of debate, contentious like everything involved in the issue. She did not take sides, merely executing the decisions made. A few brave salarians argued that given a little time and reverse-engineering, they might be able to partially restore organic functionality to affected individuals. There were too many _if's_ and _but's_ lining their reasoning though, too many variables that still left the husks in a state of semi-existence. As much as it pained some to admit it, death was the only viable resolution. She dealt it.

 

After a thorough inspection without finding anything objectionable, she was led to the half-transformed part of the encampment. It was quieter there, the atmosphere tenser. Some of the husks were rattling the cages keeping them, and some were just curled up on the floor, scratching at the dirt with their charred glowing hands.

 

“Have you tried stimulating them?” she asked, more because the checklist demanded it – a clause implemented by the salarians seeking to investigate higher cognitive functions – but she knew what the turian would say either way.

 

“They don't respond to it.”

 

She made a note of it on her report.

 

The first case of the day was a lone banshee kept separated in a small cell, biotics flaring up around her shoulders whenever she turned her head. The banshee still retained a blue skin tone, her body not yet pulled out into the elongated shape they normally were in. She shuffled to and fro in the enclosure, hunched over as if in great pain, keeping her gnarly hands at a distance from her body. What was most telling was that she still retained some asari shapes, enough to have been covered in clothes for a modicum of decency.

 

When she saw Shepard, she let out a dry grunt. The noise died in her throat and came out choked, the vocal cords destroyed. Even as she tried again she was becoming distraught, a blue shimmer surrounding her body.

 

“She gets like that,” the turian said with a sigh. “Her barriers can be pretty strong.”

 

Shepard took out her pistol, modifying the ammunition to be able to bypass the mass effect fields. As she did, the banshee opened her mouth wide again but no noise came out as she fell down on her hands and knees. Her eyes blinked a few times, the big dark orbs briefly shimmering with a different color – Shepard saw hints of purple or dark blue – before becoming black again as the barrier dropped. 

 

As she raised the gun, the banshee turned her head to the turian next to Shepard. Her long claws reached out towards him before she closed her hands and pulled them back, arms crossing her chest as she turned her face up. The shot rung out and pierced right through her head.

 

An electric pulse shuddered all across her body before the disintegration process began, her flesh burning up as the mass effect fields in her nervous system reduced her to nothing but ashes. In the last tremble of being, her eyes flew open. 

 

Blue. Blue like the ocean.

 

A breeze blew the ashes away, scattering them over the feet of the turian aide. He was stiff, mandibles flaring, his breathing strained.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

“She was my wife,” the turian said, his vivid eyes locking with Shepard. “Thank you.”

 

Shepard did not respond. What could she even say; _you're welcome?_ _My pleasure?_ “Why didn't you stop me?”

 

“I have no say in what happens to her. Not that I have anything to say, either way. I'm just glad it was you who did it.”

 

No one was meant to know who she was, but then she squinted her eyes, recognizing him. “I...”

 

“How long would they continue to live anyway, without us doing this? Can you imagine the years piling up, a hundred, a thousand, and you're this monster kept away because no one...” He took a deep shuddering breath. “Because no one had the courage to end you. Because I could not. Forgive me, love...”

 

She averted her eyes, fiddling with the pistol. The minutes passed in silence, Shepard simply listening to how his breathing changed, how the strange low keen of a turian in mourning grew silent as he pulled himself together. “How many more today?” she asked when he was quiet again.

 

“A lot,” Oraka said, datapad ready to tick off the bodies. “We better get to it.”

 

He followed her through the day, and was the one who sent her off in the evening. They exchanged no more words, just glances between weary soldiers, exhausted by the strain they had been put through. Only when they parted did he said her name, low enough to not be overheard by anyone, and pressed her hand between his.

 

Seated in the back of the shuttle, she took off her helmet again and studied the reflection of Shepard – the hard soldier, the unflinching commander, the galactic savior. Just another aspect of who she was.

 

Shepard was one entity. The Butcher another. They all overlapped, forming her: one person, a handful of names, a thousand stories. Shepard was the one already turned legendary, eclipsing everything else she could possibly hope to be: long after her death, all the rest might be forgotten, but Shepard would survive.

 

Then there was Zoë. Easily forgettable and hard to know: her first name was rarely mentioned in any connection and she preferred it that way. It allowed for a lick of privacy, a name only the ones she chose were allowed to call her.

 

Back in her private quarters, she stripped down to her underwear in a frenzy and put through a call to Lesuss. The few minutes it took to connect was time she spent restlessly flipping through reports and documents without taking anything in: at least she gave up and ran her fingers through her hair, fingering the scar tissue criss-crossing her scalp.

 

“Zoë.” The voice greeting her was warm and soft, immediately melting the tension out of her.

 

“Hello Samara.” She smiled at the communicator, imagining Samara's face as she spoke. “I can't tell you what I have been up to – it's all classified – but trust me that hearing your voice is what I need right now.”

 

“I am flattered.”

 

“Could you... Could you just talk to me about something very mundane?”

 

“What is wrong?”

 

“Please.” Shepard felt her voice cracking slightly. “Anything.”

 

Samara was quiet for a moment. “I wish I was there with you. I wish there was something I could do, and that we were not separated by this distance and obligations. There is little I desire, but most of it is tied up with you and the times we should have together, the places we ought to be. The peace we need to find. I think of it a lot, my love.”

 

“Me too,” she sighed. She wanted to tell Samara every little detail from the day, if only because it kept haunting her mind – the way Oraka was brave and vulnerable all at once, the way she was just like a cold steel blade swinging through the motions, the oceanic eyes of the banshee – but she merely sighed again and slumped forward on the desk, arms folded under her head. “But please. Tell me about your day.”

 

As she listened to Samara's low voice, she closed her eyes and imagined the house by the sea she used to dream of, with Samara's skin blending into the water perfectly.


End file.
